In the Critics section of this week’s New Statesman, Paul Morley relives the experience of listening to his first Sony Walkman on the London Underground in 1979. “I … imagined I was the first person to sit on the Tube listening to music of my own choosing.” That music would have been the avant-garde rock that Morley himself, in the pages of the New Musical Express, had christened “post-punk”: “It was a culmination, rearrangement, refinement of experimental ideas, sounds and principles instigated by punk.” And much of it was influenced by the German group Can, whom Morley describes as “less a rock group than a compact orchestra, a jazz collective, a cartel of dreamers … This was my kind of pop group.”
In Books, the historian Richard Overy reviews David Canndine’s The Undivided Past: History Beyond Our Differences. Cannadine chastises his fellow historians for concentrating on conflict rather than on what human beings have had in common down the ages. Overy is not convinced. “There remain profound differences in the world that have deep historical roots … Appeals to a common humanity are not going to change that.”
Also in Books: John Sutherland defends Stephen Spender against charges laid by James Smith in his book British Writers and MI5 Surveillance, 1930-60 (“Spender has attracted more than his share of sneers during his lifetime and after … Among the admirable scholarship in this book, there is, I think, an injustice”); Simon Heffer reviews Does Spelling Matter? by Simon Horobin (“This book is a sane, comprehensive and authoritative lesson in why we spell the way we do and why, in order to preserve the richness, subtlety and history of our language, it is right that we keep doing so”); Jon Day reviews John Jeremiah Sullivan’s Blood Horses: Notes of a Sportswriter’s Son (“The focus of Blood Horses is Sullivan’s relationship with his father, a poetically inclined sports journalist”); Claire Lowdon reviews This Is the Way, the second novel by Irish writer Gavin Corbett (“This fresh and funny novel is a devastating love story … that stays with you long after you’ve finished reading”); Talitha Stevenson reviews Andrew Wilson’s biography of Sylvia Plath, Mad Girl’s Love Song (“For all the posthumous inventions, some of the Plath fantasia was created by Sylvia Plath [herself]”).
Elsewhere in the Critics: Kate Mossman is forced to wait two hours for Justin Bieber to take the stage at the O2 (“Bieber comes on stage at 10.20pm, which is a bit of an issue on a Monday night for an audience of 20,000 children …”); our film critic Ryan Gilbey reviews Rufus Norris’s Broken and Robot & Frank, directed by Jake Schreier (“The joys of Robot & Frank are numerous”); Rachel Cooke reviews ITV’s Broadchurch and Mayday on BBC1 (“Aidan Gillen [in Mayday] is so compelling, it’s almost embarrassing”); Antonia Quirke listens to After Saddam on Radio 4 (“Presenter Hugh Sykes had no trouble digging up horror stories”).
PLUS: “Tremor”, a poem by Fiona Sampson, and Will Self’s Madness of Crowds.
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