Some pop-flavoured questions

[mippy.livejournal.com]

I know there'll be someone here who can help - apols if this is off-topic.

* What was the socio-economic situation in small-town Scotland in the 1980s? Was it roughly like Liverpool? Manchester? Were there actually YTS schemes in place if you wanted them?

* What was the situation with sectarianism, outside of the bigger cities? Was it a constant prescence, rather like racial conflict is in small Northern towns, or something that flashed up occasionally cf. Notting Hill, Toxteth?

* I might be wrong here as I've been thinking about other things all day and am a bit fuzzy, but I would say the kind of music working-class kids listen to *outside big cities* tends to be, as a generalisation, happy hardcore or West Coast hip-hop from about 1993. (I'm thinking Bodycount or Cypress Hill here..) Or, if female, chart dance that gets played on TMF. In mainstream terms. You know, small towns that are so...insular that they seem to have a pop culture all of their own, like a version of the Eden Centre but with more graffiti. How different was this twenty years ago? Goths? Heavy metal? The post-punk/indie stuff that came back into fashion in the past few years (remember small towns catch on a couple of years after the big cities)? As a pointer, my sister was sixteen in 1986 and has never heard of The Smiths, but liked Depeche Mode. So I am slightly confused.

* How instilled with ambition were 'secondary modern' kids in the early 80s? I mean,  I could use my sister as an example as she went to one, but her dream was always to settle down and have kids so the idea of going on to career/higher education wouldn't have been there.

* Are there any novels which touch on pop culture (s as much as everyday life/plot, as in, the two are firmly intertwined and one could imagine what song the character might be humming at any given point, say? The only 80s Scottish novels I can recall right now are The Trick Is To Keep Breathing and Lanark - one being magical-realist, one being very much an interior monologue. There are a lot of sub-Coupland pop-lit writers who namedrop bands/artists to fit in with the zeitgeist, but I don't mean that. I vaguely remember a slacker-lit (!) novel with a green cover where the waiters sung REM songs, but that was about it. Amis probably hasn't been near a HMV outside of Christmas time. *Maybe* The Buddha of Suburbia, but I haven't actually read any Hanif Kureshi since I was about sixteen. The fact I am having to think hard about this suggests it doesn't happen very often, and that can't be right.

Comments

[koganbot]

The book you want is Gordon Legge's The Shoe. It's set in a big city (Glasgow, I think) or one of its near 'burbs, but in every other way it's EXACT: a novel about a bunch of working-class kids in the '80s talking about their records and football. Think there was a lot of leftover glam in their tastes, but I haven't read it in 15 years so don't remember. Probably some new pop. They definitely did not like Jeff Beck's solo hit. But others they ran into in pubs did, so...

"The kind of music working-class kids listen to" is way too big a category, since working-class kids divide up into different factions. But whatever decade you're looking at from the '70s onwards there will be some working-class boys listening to metal. If it's the '80s in the U.S., the metal boys' girlfriends might be listening to Stevie Nicks. Or Poison. Can't say any more, having never set foot in Scotland.

[byebyepride.livejournal.com]

How did you come across The Shoe, Frank? It was published about a minute's walk from my office!

[mippy.livejournal.com]

I know few people who have even heard of it - it's very much a favourite book of mine.

[byebyepride.livejournal.com]

At least one other Freaky Trigger contributor has read it!

http://freakytrigger.co.uk/ft/wedge/2004/08/gordon-legge-a-little-appreciation/

[koganbot]

Simon Frith had a couple of pieces in which he recommended The Shoe and Carl MacDougall's Stone Over Water; I mentioned to him in a letter that one couldn't find them in San Francisco. Incredibly, he bought them and sent them to me.

(I actually preferred Stone Over Water. More personal [and '60sish leftist], and formed itself better into a story. The Shoe was fundamentally a sketch of people and milieu, but never propelled itself into people's personalities and actions having consequences, even if there is a fight near the end. But I've long since lost my copy. Still have the MacDougall.)

[koganbot]

And I wrote Simon that he should read Mary Gaitskill's Two Girls, Fat And Thin, which references music only a little but those uses of music (The Troggs' "Love Is All Around" and Skid Row's "18 And Life") are extraordinary. She makes sense of how a thirteen-year-old girl could connect "Love Is All Around" to Orwell's 1984. But also the novel's really depicting an American junior high school at its most annihilating makes it a novel about rock 'n' roll even if it hadn't mentioned rock 'n' roll. Actually, her latest novel, Veronica, uses music more, and just as well.

[mippy.livejournal.com]

I much prefer that to the author who chucks in references liberally, showing their geekdom but adding nothing ti the character. #(Incidentally I've read some of Gaitskill's short stories but not cared for them much.)

[mippy.livejournal.com]

No! This is to do with The Shoe - some research around it. I was wondering whether it came from some other tradition/influences. There was a girl Archie was intrigued by who was reading an old NME about Bowie on the train, so you could be right about the glam...

I know it's a very general category...I was thinking mainly small town UK, specifically northern England/Scotland.

[thenipper.livejournal.com]

Also Alan Warner: Morvern Caller is a bit of an 80s indie boy fantasy of the ideal girl - she listens to Can and the Cocteaus - but there's something OTM to her character.

Ooh, and Martin Millar, for a squat-Scot-surrealist take on 80s dole life.

[thenipper.livejournal.com]

I suppose Irvine Welsh is probably the key figure here, actually.

[boof-boy.livejournal.com]

Try The Wasp Factory by Ian Banks. Great book set on the Forth River (I seem to remember).

Might also be worth tracking down Gregory's Girl and That Sinking Feeling - films by Bill Forsyth set in Cumbernauld.

[barrysarll.livejournal.com]

Concur. Not a novel, but Gregory's Girl = essential.

[mippy.livejournal.com]

Do you learn anything about the cultural life of the kids in GG, though? I've long maintained it's less a film about romance than one about teenage obsessions - the cooking kid, the bus kid, Caracas - but it's not a 'pop music' film.

[barrysarll.livejournal.com]

Mmmm. Thinking about it, I feel as though I know what sort of music they'd like, but not so much because it's explicitly stated in the film as because they're so well-drawn that one feels one can infer the unseen details of their lives and tastes.

[byebyepride.livejournal.com]

I should be able to give more examples, given this is supposed to be my specialist subject, but I can't think of any!

Legge and Welsh were pals, I think, and used to be in a group which got together to talk about records together. Legge describes something like this, from a very romanticised perspective in his contribution to Children of Albion Rovers, although it's really about the disconnect between their musical lives and their everyday lives. There's some discussion of music in Trainspotting, but it's not integral to any of the characters' lives I wouldn't say.

Also, corrections to other posters: The Wasp Factory is set on a fictional island in the Highlands (I imagined it being East Coast but I don't remember it being specific, and that may just be because it reminded me of Tain); the book set on the Forth (which is not a river) is probably The Bridge, which is a knock-off -- sorry, tribute to -- Lanark.

[byebyepride.livejournal.com]

There are some references to punk in The Wasp Factory, though.

Banks's Espedair Street (1987) is about a rock musician, but growing up in the 1970s (when Banks would have been in his teens). In fact I guess you'd expect books about 80s music to have been published in the 90s.

Anyway -- my exposure to small town Scottish life (via my girlfriend) came from 1993 onwards. Her friends were into Nirvana, Metallica, AC/DC (I was talking to someone the other day about how the 'cool' / 'not-cool' metal / alternative split happened much later the further you went from the centre. (I remember her brother who later on 'got' indie, saying to someone that I had been wearing a dinosaur Jr T-shirt before he'd ever heard of them. A lot of people were into Runrig -- who I think would have to be one of the few distinctive features of the Highland landscape (central belt equivalent The Proclaimers? Deacon Blue? The Silencers?). Certainly 'classic' rock (Dylan, Stones) was big amongst the kids who were 'into' music (presumably via parent's / older brother's collections. Happy Hardcore is a distinctly regional phenomena in Scotland, focused mostly around Ayr, and to a lesser extent the estate kids from the Glasgow sprawl. There was homegrown hip-hop in Livingstone in the 90s definitely, which contrasted with the homegrown backpacker / hipster-hop from Edinburgh.

[byebyepride.livejournal.com]

Pink Floyd were big too!

[byebyepride.livejournal.com]

Sectarianism:

This is pretty much a Glasgow phenomenon, where whole estates were either Protestant or Catholic thanks to council resettlement after the slum clearances. (Denise Mina's Field of Blood is a crime novel with a detailed depiction of this in the early 80s.) Although there are annual marches in Edinburgh, and Hibs / Hearts have minor sectarianism amongst their supporters, it's not a big issue really. Tensions in the Highlands were between locals and incomers, mostly English.

[mippy.livejournal.com]

I know in the NW it was happy hardcore for the estate kids, while the 'nebs' listened to RATM, the Stone Roses, Nirvana and later KoRn. It was very much one or the other - it was rare to find a kid who listened to indie, or folk, or anything pre-1989. Obviously these are the white kids I'm talking about here.

[mippy.livejournal.com]

Yeah - I haven't read Trainspotting for about ten years but I remember any discussion in there to be football-based.

The Shoe reminds me in some ways of The Commitments and The Van - very similar communities, although Roddy Doyle doesn't tend to concentrate on younger characters much IIRC. I'd reply properly to your excellent comments but I should be packing a suitcase right now :)