The last madcap laugh

'Postings From An Edge' gets a second rock obituary.

Syd Barrett, one of the founders of Pink Floyd and long considered British rock's greatest recluse, has died at the age of 60, from complications related to diabetes.

His songs, both for the group that went on to become one of the world's biggest rock bands of the 1970's and his solo releases, were whimsical, surreal and quintessentially English - nestling comfortably in the canon of English surrealism that would also include Lewis Carroll, Spike Milligan, John Lennon, Edward Lear and Monty Python, amongst others.

His reputation, however, is more of one of acid rock's casualties. Struggling with his new-found fame back in 1967 and delving too far into that year's drogue-de-rigeur, LSD, his mental condition began to deteriorate. Behaviour at Pink Floyd's performances became increasingly erratic. After departing the group in 1968, he made some attempts at a solo career in the early 70's. These efforts ultimately floundered and he eventually retreated from public life. He left London and returned to Cambridgeshire to live with his mother, which is where he died.

Undoubtedly, many obituaries will be headlined with the title of the song that the group wrote in tribute to him on their 1975 hit album, 'Wish You Were Here' - 'Shine On You Crazy Diamond'. Perhaps an appropriate tribute here would be a quotation of those very lyrics:

Remember when you were young, you shone like the sun.
Shine on you crazy diamond.
Now there's a look in your eyes, like black holes in the sky.
Shine on you crazy diamond.
You were caught on the crossfire of childhood and stardom,
Blown on the steel breeze.
Come on you target for faraway laughter, come on you stranger, you legend,
You martyr, and shine!

You reached for the secret too soon, you cried for the moon.
Shine on you crazy diamond.
Threatened by shadows at night, and exposed in the light.
Shine on you crazy diamond.
Well you wore out your welcome with random precision,
Rode on the steel breeze.
Come on you raver, you seer of visions, come on you painter, you piper,
You prisoner, and shine!

The difference a day makes

I've always gone through different phases with books. Sometimes, I'll read voraciously and whizz through anything I can get my mitts on. Other times, I'll have utterly barren eras where a book barely passes through my hands, but for once in a couple of years (exaggerations hopefully excused for the sake of literary licence). In recent times - since I moved to Tokyo - I've gone through one of those lean periods, as I've mostly been far too busy in trying to lay the groundwork for the new life I started making for myself. Probably less than 10 novels in 3 years.

Over Christmas 2005, I stepped off the Tokyo wheel for a while and forced myself to relax, exchanging the East Asian archipelago of Japan for East Africa and Tanzania. Believe me, stopping can be a tough thing to do in this town. Whilst slowing down a while, I had the pleasure of immersing myself in the joys of Zadie Smith's debut novel, the intricately interwoven tale of multi-ethnic London that is 'White Teeth'. Not only was it good to step into the well crafted pages of somebody else's imagination for a moment, it was also a bloody good read.

Just completed reading my second novel in 6 months. Not exactly a cracking pace, it has to be said, but a pleasure to have done so all the same. Depicted above, I've just made it through my first take on an Ian McEwan novel, with 'Saturday'. I've never spent a great deal of time ploughing through the contemporary 'old British vanguard', yet was pleasantly surprised and a little proud of this gem. McEwan could very easily be considered as operating at the peak of his game. Richly descriptive, it tells the tale of one man's life over the course of a single day, again in London - the city of a million different stories.

All the more pertinent for me, the trials of the day of Henry Perowne were backdropped by the anti-war march held on February 15th 2003 - an event where anywhere up to 2 million people may well have taken to the streets of London to express their opposition to the then pending US-led (and British-followed) war in Iraq. A textbook case in military misadventure, if ever there was one. I joined this march, apparently the biggest public protest in British history, having felt a calling I couldn't ignore. I went along too with a MiniDisc player and a clip-mic, and recorded the sounds of the street, later working extracts from these recordings into some of the songs that appeared on my first album as Control K.

Having made my own attempts at representing this surge of popular feeling in art, it was a pleasure to discover somebody else having done so too, and at a considerably higher level than my efforts. While the world may currently lack the first 'great post 9/11 novel', McEwan's efforts at depicting the realities of the changed modern world that the Bushites forcibly dragged the rest of the planet into make for both a good read and a valuable document of these times. It's not entirely without traces of optimism too, though they are certainly subtle and read 'between the lines'.

When our grandchildren look back at the turn of the 21st Century, as we only recently did for the turn of the 20th, pointers such as this may well give them a good flavour of this era.

The question remains to be seen, however, whether they will be cursing us or praising us.

'A new page': Brighton short story

Blogging does turn out to be a rather good way of connecting back to where you've been. Amongst my respondents so far on this blog have been old friends from my bookselling days in Brighton, which has in turn inspired me to check out what's going back on there. This is a community for some Brighton bloggers.

Idleformat mentions the new website he's worked on for showcasing Brighton writers, 'The Deckchair' (cheers for the highly complimentary and distinctintly self-deprectating entry on yours, my good man!).

I now have my first short story published with them, a tale of one young man and his gang's efforts to enjoy themselves on New Year's Eve 1999, the turn of the millenium. You can read it here. I anticipate this place becoming a repository for my thoughts of home and the older tales I came up with when at college. Can university really have been that long ago now? Where does time go in our lives? Mine gets lost in the Tokyo machine these days.

An invitation then for comments: How did you spend the turn of the millenium?

Rowan, another compatriot from the period of my life shifting dusty tomes and bestsellers, also alerts me to her pages. She has a personal blog here and a book review one here.

Dip in to literary Brighton. The water might be cold, but the hearts are warm!

That's The Way God Planned It?

There were many people described as 'The Fifth Beatle'. Officially credited on one of their records ('Get Back/Don't Let Me Down') and therefore being the only other musician to share their name on a hit single was Billy Preston. A gifted and soulful keyboard player who performed with many of rock and soul's greatest names, he has sadly died of kidney failure at the age of 59.

RIP Billy.