Re: Weekend mail

["Nora K. Horsfall" <nora@bl...com>]

> Question that has probably been posted before (apologies for this) ...
Does Gerard just do the lyrics or does he get involved in the toons as
well?

Regarding this, and the Kinks, and Jim Morrison, and etc...what follows is
an excerpt from a(n otherwise less than remarkable) book called
"Alt-Rock-A-Rama" (even the title's crummy)...

---------

Gerard Langley Lists His Ten Biggest Literary/Lyrical Influences

W. H. Auden:  Spokesman for his generation -- and the one after and the
one
after that.  Quit England for the States in 1939 after having spent the
Spanish Civil War in a tank wearing carpet slippers.  Thereafter the Brits
booed his gigs and the Yanks hung on his every word.  I side with the
Yanks.
Introduced airmen, borders, suburban surrealism, and sheer pissed-offness
to
the culture.  Sentiment with desperation.

Louis MacNeice:  Top dude.  Due for a revival.  The only straight in a
predominantly gay scene, 30s-a-go-go, most natural axeman.  Words for him
were almost like talking, know what I mean?  Commissioned Dylan Thomas to
write Under Milk Wood in the local pub sitting next to Francis Bacon.
Made
poetry sound like breathing.

e. e. cummings:  Like Status Quo, you can't defend him.  A guilty
pleasure,
a marketing exercise, the kind of thing that gets you into writing rather
than reading.  Dig the lowercase name, dig the concepts, dig the
sweetness.
If he was born fifty years later he'd be making a fortune in adverts and
movies.

Jim Morrison:  Influences are influences.  Later you can come to think
they're a horse's ass, you can spend your whole life trying not to write
"Ode to Me Cock"; they're still an influence.  As the first person to read
bad poetry seductively (in leather trousers) to an audience prepared to
connect hips and brain, he influenced everyone.

Bob Dylan:  The only rocker to be a real heavyweight in the lit world.
Like
the Righteous Brothers playing the Apollo, it's a shock to realize that
stuff can be done by this person.  Not a considered artist but a natural,
like Stevie Smith.  Would have been significant just as a writer, which -
given his guitar-playing, singing and chutzpah - makes him the biggest
all-rounder since Byron.

Sandy Denny:  Bob Dylan is often quoted as saying that Smokey Robinson
is/was America's greatest poet, but he was actually talking about his
voice.
(Check it out.)  Sandy Denny is/was England's greatest voice.  Drunk,
sexy,
pure, sensitive, raucous, rock & roll, fucked-up, in control.  I bought
her
first record when I was seventeen, and I tried to write like she sounded.
She died when she was thirty-seven and I miss her more than any other
artist.

Punk:  Punk, for me, wasn't any one band, not even the Pistols, it was
seventy or eighty people in a room with a band playing.  Twenty minutes
earlier, the band had been just four or five of those people.  I was into
punk, poetry, British folk-rock, and Bob Dylan.  I joined a band and
everyone said it was copying the Velvets.  Well, there you go.

Jacques Tati:  I saw Monsieur Hulot's Holiday when I was at school.  I saw
it five times in a week at a cinema that's now a Mothercare shop.  Later,
two French people gave me a handmade T-shirt saying "Jacques Tati loves
the
Blue Aeroplanes."  I don't know why he should be an influence except:
Humanism?  Awkwardness?  A love of the personal?  Sympathy?  Tolerance?

Kenneth Patchen:  Kenneth Patchen was a beat poet in the thirties, twenty
years before Ginsberg or Kerouac.  He painted his poems into a corner and
suffocated because of it.  I covered one of his poems, "Do the Dead Know
What Time It Is?," after I borrowed an LP of him performing it with a jazz
band.  I wish I could find that LP now.  He taught me that poems and
paintings are the same.

Ray Davies:  Ray Davies is not so much an influence as an inspiration.  I
don't understand how one person could write so many brilliant tunes in
such
a short space of time.  I don't write music very often, but I know enough
about it to realize that "Days," "Celluloid Heroes," and "There's a New
World Opening for Me" replicate emotion as directly as anyone could wish.
If Shakespeare had hung out with Ray, we would never have had to invent
pop
music.

------------



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