Album of the Month: AND NOTHING HURT by Spiritualized

And Nothing Hurt is not just the best album of the month. It's the best album of the year - because you'd have to record some fucking Abbey Road to beat this. 

The album was not released last year, to coincide with the 20th anniversary of Ladies and Gentlemen, We are Floating in Space, but one cursory listen to And Nothing Hurt should give you an idea why. To paraphrase the great T.S. Eliot, Jason Pierce wanted to go out with a bang, not a whimper. And so if this is to be Spiritualized's final record, and I hope to God it isn't, then this is the kind of bang the Spaceman deserved. He put that much care, and talent, and time, and health, into the proceedings. 

"A Perfect Miracle" brings back the precious memories of the famed title song from 1997, and Pachelbel, and all those striking melodies that Jason Pierce has written over the years. "I'm Your Man" is a timeless anthem of awkward manhood. "Here It Comes (The Road) Let's Go" is one of those simple tunes you'd think anyone can compose yet only the Spaceman is capable of. "Let's Dance" is a heroin waltz, all charming and vulnerable. "On The Sunshine" is the first noisy rocker of the LP, and it closes the first side with a groovy horn-filled wall of sound, Spiritualized-style.

Side B opens with a sweet sweet thing called "Damaged" with its intense instrumental passages gorgeous to a fault. "The Morning After" is almost as good as "Hey Jane" off the previous album. Its lengthy coda is total madness that would be ugly if it were not so goddamn tasteful. "The Prize" is another mellow ballad, the kind you place at the end of your final statement. Having said that, it's not the last song on the record as we also have "Sail On Through". A bombastic closer, you could think, something to rival "So Long You Pretty Things"? In fact, more like "Goodnight Goodnight" - only better. A sleeper, and a beaut.

I know I keep mentioning these other songs from Spiritualized's career, but that's because And Nothing Hurt is so mindful of its past. And I know I keep harping on about this being Jason Pierce's last album, but then those were his words. It's been a long fight, from "Cop Shoot Cop" to "Medication", and it has left its bruises. That there is so much great music coming from these bruises I can only see as a miracle. I will of course be waiting for another one, patiently, but for now this will be played until the vinyl wears thin. The album is a masterpiece. 

travelling notes (lxxi)

Somehow, Lithuanian art manages to be both overly serious and badly immature. It's some feat, but there's no escaping the boredom.

All About Eve

"All playwrights should be dead for 300 years." If you can come up with a line like that, the script you are writing is probably one of the greatest scripts of the 20th century. And it is.   

There's a lot to be said for movies about theatre (from The Producers to Bullets Over Broadway to Venus In Fur, there's that carefree playfulness about them - besides the fact that they are all monstrously well-acted), but All About Eve is one of the absolute best. However tired you are and however much red wine you have consumed over the evening, it has so much to keep you wondering, and probably guessing. Bette Davis's irresistible stare and devil-may-care genius; George Sanders's stylish cynicism; Marilyn Monroe's unassuming appearance in three short scenes. 

Unlike the slightly overrated Sunset Boulevard from the same year, there is nothing contrived about All About Eve. It's too cynical to be contrived. I wonder what took me so long. 

The last shot is of course iconic, and properly chilling, but Joseph L. Mankiewicz's screenplay (adapted from Mary Orr's short story) is what did it for me. The complexity is staggering, and clearly there is nothing dated about this 1950 take on critics and celebrities. '1950' is irrelevant. A truly ageless film. 

travelling notes (lxx)

It may well be that the most memorable part of any trip is that first taxi ride to the airport, at 4 o'clock in the morning, when something as soporific as Mark Knopfler's "Silvertown Blues" will seem like an adrenaline shot. 

Favourite Bookstores, p.6

The part of Munich I love best is between Königsplatz and Universität. In the heat of summer as well as in the knee-deep snow of late January, walking here has always been pure bliss. 

Getting lost inside Neue Pinakothek early in the morning and then, two hours later, dropping into a tiny bakery at the intersection of Theresienstrasse and Turkenstrasse. A cup of coffee, a slice of ginger cake, a few chapters from a book. Then you walk into Pinakothek der Moderne, completely by accident, and the huge white walls are devastating. The bizarre installations - not so much, but you have seen enough galleries of modern art not to be disappointed. And then, after a brief visit to the Victorian tea room whose opulent interior would have pleased Oscar Wilde, you might as well find yourself stepping into Schellingstrasse. And here, just by the subway station and the University library, you will find a bookstore named Words' Worth.  

Words' Worth. The pun is obvious but it has always been lost on me. Oddly, they only bothered to write the name of the shop on the window and what you see on the signboard above is a fairly desperate 'Anglia English Bookshop'. But who cares.

Because the place is delightful. Two floors of books, books, and more books. Granted, there is all the usual paraphernalia you may expect to find in an English bookshop outside England - china cups, Sherlock Holmes calendars, tote bags with Shakespeare, tea towels with the tedious 'Keep Calm' bullshit. But you feel it's only a clever smokescreen to get rid of tourists with no imagination, so you are willing to forgive. Because upstairs - they have all the classics, and to the left - they have the kind of books you came here for. 

In any bookstore I go to, there is a selection of authors and titles I check. It is not that I need those books, not necessarily, it is just that I have to know they are here. I love it when they are around: a collection of poems by Philip Larkin, Herzog by Saul Bellow, Nabokov's Pale Fire, a few of the latest novels by Martin Amis and Ian McEwan. Words' Worth had them all. It's not a huge place, but it had most of my favourite books. They even had a recent and very much impenetrable jungle of words from Will Self. This made me feel at home, a sense intensified by the huge bookcase in the middle of the shop that looked straight from your favourite library.

And then, on top of that, they have a great selection of recently published books you thought were too obscure to sell outside London. But here they were, and I remember being especially impressed by the unexpected appearance of The Clocks In This House All Tell Different Times by Xan Brooks. Xan Brooks has always been one of my favourite Guardian journalists, and to know that he had his debut novel out, and with a name like that, and to see it on a bookshelf in Munich, etc. I was intrigued, and so it was with this book that I found myself on the floor, half-stretched and utterly engrossed. There is a million books in any given bookstore - but for you, there's just one. And I found it.  

There's lots of that German warmth about Words' Worth, and you don't really want to leave. Outside, the August sun has faded, the January snow has gone grotesque, and it feels like you've spent a few weeks inside the bookstore. Outside, Schellingstrasse will either lead you to the Universität subway station or to the recently opened NS-Dokumentationszentrum that will no doubt exhaust you both physically and mentally. It could well be the single greatest museum I've ever been to, but I'd suggest leaving it for another day. Because this one is almost done, and you've grown a world inside of you. 

Me & Orson Welles

I have been in quite a few awkward situations in my life because I generally have the effrontery to say that Citizen Kane is not the greatest film ever made. More than that - I believe that Citizen Kane is vastly overrated. So what if it's cinematically gorgeous? It also happens to be as empty as the world it decries. 

My one salvation, however, is that I view the 1962 adaptation of The Trial as Orson Welles's absolute masterpiece. I watched it as a schoolboy, before classes, late at night, and was mesmerised by the endless rows of identical working desks as well as the impassive features of Anthony Perkins. The love scenes with Romy Schneider were something else, and for two hours at least Franz Kafka was well and truly alive. It was extremely gratifying to learn that Orson Welles considered The Trial his greatest triumph. 

Which is to say, I believe that my relationship with Orson Welles has always been personal and, as such, has spawned two memorable encounters. 

First, there was a rainy day in London four or five years back. As I reached the Elephant & Castle tube station (on foot and with a broken umbrella), I was soaked to such an extent that I was concerned they might not let me into Southwark Playhouse. Because that was one of the two reasons why I was here - to see Orson's Shadow, a somewhat absurdist play depicting Welles's attempts to talk Laurence Olivier into playing the main part in the future production of Eugene Ionesco's Rhinoceros. A mouthwatering plot, especially for someone who had by that time spent a good five or six years of his life writing about Samuel Beckett and the Theatre of the Absurd. 

And my God it was magical. I was sitting in the second row of this intimate semi-circle, with a small bottle of Sauvignon Blanc and with my feet going numb from all the rainwater they had consumed that day. There was an old lady in front me, dressed like a Woodstock survivor, and she was quite animated throughout the whole performance. Clearly there was a lot to be animated about - after all, at some point I stopped shivering (New Zealand wine might have played a part here) to be blown away by the lordly ways of Orson Welles. It takes guts to inhabit a world that makes no sense, and to do so with such inimitable authority.  

I walked back to my hotel a different man, if only for that one evening spent in the company of Orson Welles.

And then, years later, I saw this title, Me and Orson Welles, on some list of the best obscure films ever made. Something drew me to it (could be the name of Richard Linklater, could be the idea of Zac Efron being in a good film, but most likely it was a rare chance to see Orson Welles inhabit the world of his own), and another evening was spent in the company of white wine and the great man. 

It's a travesty that not too many people have seen Me and Orson Welles because it is such an unlikely triumph. Playful, stylish, unpretentious, with Christian McKay doing this absolutely magical impersonation of the famed director who is trying to adapt Caesar for the theatre stage. Welles is a loveable dictator, by turns charming and ruthless, and you can't resist fading away in his great shadow... Ultimately, it's a bruising experience for everyone involved, not least for an impressionable teenager burned inside by the subtle black and white eroticism of Romy Schneider. 

travelling notes (lxix)

There is a black woman in a book cafe and she is reading the faces of those who sit here, pensively, with their flat whites and their espressos. As soon as I notice her, I try to hide my face by looking straight at her. Swiftly, the black woman turns away, having either read me already or else deeming the book unworthy of her attention.