Pop-stars get a raw deal. As Jack Nicholson and Meryl Streep bask in the glory of A-list ageing, picking up Academy Awards and starring roles in the process, Michael Jackson, Prince and Madonna, who all turned 50 last year, are an embarrassment to the world of music. They are the drunken uncle at your wedding, or the last singer at karaoke night that belts out ‘Every Step You Take’ to an empty room. There is simply no place in show business for the pop-star with a pension.

The past month has seen successful releases from two of the guiltiest parties in this department in The Prodigy and U2. Their respective albums will slug it out at the top of the download charts over the coming weeks just as they are critically dismissed as commercial and, worst of all, irrelevant (See our review of No Line on the Horizon below). It begs the question: why do they bother?

Well, pretty obviously, if we still go to their concerts and get their albums, both bands would agree: why not? After all, How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb won eight Grammys – as many as Michael Jackson’s Thriller – and sold 9 million copies worldwide. But U2 should know better than to take these statistics to heart; the Big Lebowski’s most hated band and the softest of all soft rockers, the Eagles, won 6 Grammys and sold over 40 million copies of their Best of… alone.

In any case, when each member of the band likely has enough money to buy a dozen Pacific islands and U2 tickets still command inflated prices, the average music fan would be forgiven for feeling harshly done by.
So, what’s the alternative? If credibility, or simply ‘cool’ were all that mattered, surely all our pop-stars would be dead in their prime, the closer to Sid Vicious’ benchmark of 22 the better.

Jim Morrison, an average poet while alive, practically wrote the book on timely rock star death. His bandmates and the benefactors of his estate still reap the financial benefits of his selfless overdose almost 40 years on, every time another filmmaker, author, or record company is seduced by his manufactured myth.

It could be, of course, that we just aren’t ready for such a dramatic step. After all, mortgages on Manhattan penthouses and sex dungeons don’t just pay themselves. We could certainly do worse than looking to that elder statesman of the alternative, Frank Black. Although Black’s ample frame may only make up half of Grand Duchy’s husband-wife line-up, Petit Fours, released well under the radar a couple of weeks back, may as well be another solo release from the former Pixies front man. It’s no Doolittle, but the refreshing lack of cynicism or self-consciousness in the charming interplay between the happy couple genuinely make years of new Grand Duchy material a tantalising prospect.

Indeed, they are not alone. The consistent quality of Radiohead’s In Rainbows proved that even hugely hyped ‘experienced’ artists can impress, whilst allowing their fans to name a price for the album demonstrated a generosity in marked contrast to their more pop-tastic contemporaries (I, for one, paid nothing for the album).

Even Neil Young’s more patchy output has gained him critical respect, if recently only for his bloody-minded idiosyncrasies, while Bob Dylan’s excellent recent material, 2006’s Modern Times in particular, has shown off his considerable pop survival instincts.

So what makes a grand old person of rock? Why do Patti Smith and Leonard Cohen have our eternal respect, whilst Bono and the rest come off as mere attention seekers, playing to a bored public from the roof of the BBC? It could be arbitrary – the music industry is notoriously fickle, even unfair, but there is something about the complacency of expecting the world to hang on their every word that is shared by so many of those mature acts.

If Liam Howlett opening The Prodigy’s new album with ‘We are the Prodigy’ as if adressing yet another adoring festival crowd wasn’t bad enough, Bono rather sums it all up: ‘U2 is an original species…there are colours and feelings and emotional terrain that we occupy that is ours and ours alone’. If that doesn’t make you yearn for another Neil Young electronica album, then it should.

Straight To DVD, the home of C2’s war on substandard film-making, has reached a new heights. Having thoroughly scraped the cinematic barrel, from Trailer Park of Terror to Psycho 2, one awful film has finally gained the recognition it deserves. Just last week the Nairobi Star, Kenya’s foremost national newspaper, picked up our man Josh Lobes’ review of Mob Doc.

The film is a low-budget classic of Kenya’s booming (and non-existent) independent film scene, exemplifying the cutting edge brilliance of Jitu Films.

Our review has been picked up by the Nairobi Star as an example of the foreign response to Kenyan cinema. Sitting under the catchy headline, ‘How foreign eyes described Kenyan film as Art-House gold’ lies our very own review of Mob Doc, proving sarcasm to be an international language.

Admittedly, the review has taken a serious detour via the Nairobi Star editing office. No longer is it the crafted satire we are so used to seeing from the pen of Josh Lobes (pronounced Lo-Bez) instead it has been turned into a glowing review.

I spoke Lobes himself on the subject. He seemed affronted by the twisting of his satirical tone, in his own words ‘I think they missed the point a little.’ However, he has generously said that ‘anything that’s good for Kenya is good for Josh Lobes.’ Who would have thought that a copy of Cherwell would reach far-flung Nairobi? It’s a true testament to the power of the global marketplace of ideas. Nestled beside an advert for ‘Almed’s Chocolate Bra and Panties’ sits a well-traveled article.

The good news for Lobes is that the editing whiz-kids at the Nairobi Star slipped up. Much as they may have tried to remove all satirical content, one line of Lobes’ slipped under the radar. At least both the Cherwell and the Star agree that Mob Doc ‘looks like it was made by children’. Therein lies the essence of Straight To DVD: journalism worthy of the films that we watch.

It’s 1968. Joe Mack is hitchiking through Europe. And I don’t care. Sorry Joe. I’m sure you’re a nice guy and all; and you don’t write badly. In fact, Mack has quite a pleasant turn of phrase; there are some real purple patches in his prose.

‘The early morning sun is a bright gold ball burning in a slice of sky above the horizon, and below thick clouds. I turn so its rays strike my back. Its warmth feels wonderful. Sunshine makes me stronger. Today is a good day and around the corner is a good breakfast’. That, for example, is a decent chunk of writing.

It’s not fantastic, but it’s sun-baked, lean, clean, streamlined, spare, hard-boiled American writing. Its debt to Bukowski, Kerouac, Chandler and Fante is clear but, I think, deliberately so: a passage that could be lifted straight from Ask the Dust or Playback is a powerful reminder that, however deep Mack gets into Europe, and however disillusioned he becomes with his homeland as he does so, he can never escape America.

So that’s not only good writing; it’s clever writing. Authorial ability is not Joe Mack’s big problem. His big problem is that he does nothing to prove that his book is anything other than a vanity project. There’s a note on the back cover that reminds the reader to ‘remember he’s twenty-one’. Big deal. I’m twenty-one. More importantly, so were hundreds, even thousands of Americans who made the same journeys as Mack across Europe in the late sixties.

It was a momentous time, and the shared experience of this group of Americans living a crosscultural life in the golden age of counterculture is deserving of some serious historical documentation.

There’s simply nothing to suggest that Mack’s story alone, told with a personal pride that frequently spills into smugness, is worth anything on its own. Mack ends up seeming as annoyingly wide-eyed, as irritatingly oblivious to his own falsely presumed sense of his own specialness, as any Cornmarket tourist.

1 star

Frank Egerton is, at the least, intensely familiar with Oxford. As both a former English student and a librarian at the Taylorian, one would expect him to be rather grounded in the city, possessed of knowledge beyond the blinkered perspective of the mere student.

Indeed, Oxford looms high throughout; though the action swings through London and West Oxfordshire, the author seldom escapes the city’s influence. Even the Dickens-themed pub chain that the protagonist maintains echoes Oxford’s penchant for Hardy-themed dens.

Invisible is billed as a dystopian romance set in New Labour’s Britain. Egerton’s principal narrator, the middle-aged Tom Dickens, recounts his past in writing as a form of literary therapy. He recalls deciding to trade both his long-term girlfriend and his business interests to start afresh in a more rustic manner, a decision that results in passion, strife and eventual invisibility. Diary entries from Tom’s lover Sarah are scattered throughout the book, along with the occasional third person passage.

The text slumps in and out of these two lives, providing the reader with a selection of scenes and memories that form an incomplete picture of both.

Egerton refuses to reject unwieldy symbolism. At one point, for instance, Tom reaches revelation regarding the private and the public through watching his partner vomit.
There is no doubt that the internal becomes external at this point, but the very idea of gaining a universal insight through such only provokes incredulity. Similes and idioms long blasted into meaninglessness, the sort that would make Orwell turn in his grave, abound.
Furthermore, the prose feels rather heavy-handed, stilted by an often sparse diction into un-naturalistic expressions.

There is a sense during dialogue in the novel that people, well, don’t really speak like this. Discarding all these issues, however, the central impression left by the novel is, well, that of invisibility.

Although predominantly written through the eyes of two characters, one senses very little of them. Both their words and thoughts do not seem to emerge from their own existence as fictional characters, but rather from a factually dry narrator who remains static throughout. The characters continuously describe and define themselves, as if Egerton is unable to resist the third person viewpoint even as he writes in the first.

Ultimately, Invisible’s style hampers it, rendering it no more than a series of soap opera moments that simply cannot make the novel stand out.

2 Stars

Freedom of speech is a good thing, most people agree. Except when it takes effort. In 2004, Birmingham Repertory Theatre put on Behzti, a play which showed a rape in a Sikh temple; after a riot outside the theatre by outraged Sikhs, the play was cancelled, on grounds of health and safety. Mob violence achieved its aims, and the government and police agreed that it was the right thing to do; speaking out, it seems, is just too risky. Four years on, Birmingham Rep refused to discuss the topic with Cherwell.

Outrageous? Yes, but it could have been avoided. Theatre isn’t like other arts. With writing, it’s easy to see what freedom of speech should be: people should be able to write what they like, unless they’re actually racists or homophobes trying to cause hate killings. Thanks to the web, you can just put up whatever you like on a blog, and those who don’t like what a text says can just look away. Theatre’s different: Birmingham Rep could have just put on something a little less risky. A little censorship, and they wouldn’t have seemed so censorious.

On the other hand, it’s easy to see things their way. Behzti, many reviewers argue, was not damning social criticism but schlock shock theatre, calculated to attract attention: is it really a theatre’s duty to outrage people just to get a bad playwright noticed, even if they should have the right to if they want? Similar things have been said about The Jewel of Medina, a novel about Mohammed’s marriage to a nine-year-old, which was spiked last year after its publisher’s house was firebombed, and the far-right Dutch MP Geert Wilders, banned from the UK on grounds of public safety last month after he announced plans to show a film of pages from the Koran intercut with explosions.Here’s the problem with freedom of speech: sometimes you just wish the people you’re defending had never put pen to paper. Earlier this term, I went to see a talk by think-tank director Douglas Murray. Speaking to him afterwards, I mentioned that I was writing this article, and he smiled. One thing that pained him, he told me, was how he had to defend works he hated, like The Jewel of Medina: “It’s not even as good as softcore pornography, it’s more boring.” (He’s not very popular with Muslims either, and given that he’s said British-born Muslim terrorists should be deported to their grandparents’ country, and that Israel’s attack on Gaza was wholly proportionate and marked by its concern for the Gazans’ welfare, agreeing’s not hard.)

The other limitation of freedom of speech is context: who wrote it? When I straw-polled my friends, most agreed that some jokes only aren’t racist if a black person makes them. And if we’re thinking about a play not a joke, it’s easy to see that a theatre might feel that a play about Sikhs coming from a Sikh or ex-Sikh sounds more insightful than one from a white Old Etonian like Murray. But surely it’s disgraceful to say that there are plays only some people can write, if they want them to be staged at least. Orwell understood this: there’s a passage in The Road To Wigan Pier agonising over communists ranting about how rich women trying to teach working-class families home economy were patronising: though he understood their anger, he knew that the comrades were too non-judgemental to care about children fed diets of white bread and sweetened milk, with nary a vegetable in sight.

In theatre, then, there can never be a simple policy of freedom of speech: we already have a censorship by merit before plays see a rehearsal space. Directors have to consider before they put on a play whether they’re looking at controversial play that the public should be allowed to see, or deliberately controversial attention-seeking (and whether they should put on the latter anyway). These aren’t questions with simple, glib answers, and the police’s response to Behzti, simply caving into a mob’s demands, doesn’t make me confident that they’re going to be able to make it responsibly in future. Above all, if a play provokes a riot, whatever it says, the last thing the government should do is show that rioting’s the way to get what you want. It’s quite likely that Behzti has left theatres too scared to criticise or mock anybody who might fight back: in other words, exactly the people socially aware theatres should be mocking and criticising.