Hanif Kureishi - Collected Essays

‘Missing your homework for a rock ’n’ roll band,’ I grumbled. ‘You’ll have to do it in the morning on the bus.’

Then, as casually as I could, I asked one of them what he was best at, at school. ‘Don’t worry about it, Dad,’ he said thoughtfully, ‘I’m the best looking.’

The boys, who are uninterested in most adult things, were mesmerised by the show. They considered the evening to be ‘sick’, watching the guitarist and drummer carefully, talking to one another about what the musicians were doing.

It might have been the usual rock ’n’ roll experience: sticky carpets, the toilet cistern leaking on your head, people taking your seat, the boredom and excitement of waiting for the band to appear, and a headache at the end.

But during the gig I recalled a quote from Jann Wenner, the founder of Rolling Stone magazine, who said something like, ‘I recognised that the most talented of my generation were going into music, so I did too.’

Wenner was acknowledging the truth, something I’ve known since my teens. Music has been the most interesting, significant, liberating and sexually compelling cultural force of my time — and the most lively, gifted and attractive people went into it. Alas for the talentless and shy.

Now, nearly thirty years after Sgt Pepper , it is not only Tony Blair strumming his Stratocaster in the evenings and at weekends. A good proportion of the over-forty male population is learning how to master Samba TaPi. Well-off and winding-down, these lost men can now spend a lot of time in the music shops of Denmark Street, and with friends, practising their licks.

A successful writer pal of mine has been rehearsing with his band every Monday for ten years. He jammed with my sons, recently, teaching them Clash songs while they explained to him who The Feeling are.

For this man there is much to wonder over, and even regret. ‘Don’t you think’, he says seriously, and almost plaintively, ‘I could have been in a professional band — maybe as a bassist? I’m not Hendrix, but I’m as good a player as many of those who made it.’

Like most of my generation, I’ve spent more time listening to music than I have spent reading. Pop is the cultural form I have in common with most of my friends, and certainly, as I’m discovering, with the kids.

Luckily, after listening to hip-hop for a couple of years, my sons turned to American rock, and then to British pop and rock. I became interested in music again through them. Otherwise I’d feel a little embarrassed liking the Kooks and the Streets, as if I should have grown out of it.

When music hall died after the war, re-appearing on television as variety, pop took its place on the stages of those old theatres. During the fifty years I’ve been alive, this country has continued to produce masses of high-class music, as well as absorbing and reinterpreting American music, and saturating its youth in the leery attitudes which accompany it.

Pop is the ‘outsider’s’ cry — free speaking to a large audience — which has done more to remake British identity than any other form, and the spirit of punk still inspires it.

British music has always been mixed up in all senses. It is a democratic form, and it is multi-cultural; it has been black and Asian, working-class, middle-class, gay and lesbian. If I find myself talking to the kids about this, it is because this is their history too, and something they might like to know about, indeed probably should know about, as an alternative education.

The present commitment and fervency of religious believers is disconcerting, impressive and daunting, making us wonder what it is we believe. Our own lack of such belief might make us slightly ashamed. However, if such commitments are more or less unavailable to us, there are others which are, though they are less tangible and authoritarian, less of a programme, and more about feeling and self-expression.

But that which makes an identity — perhaps the most important part of it — might be something which, as the Who put it, you ‘can’t explain’, that is put beyond the refinement of language.

Pop still represents the voices of those who are not normally listened to, and there remains something subversive and obscene about it. The odour of cheap sexuality, drugs and drinking, as well as desperation and people going mad, remind us that pop is, ultimately, about the deepest and most important things: anarchic enjoyment and bodily pleasure.

Unlike most art, which becomes over-sophisticated as it develops, pop remains simple and direct. As with music hall, its most important qualities are vulgarity, naivety and exhibitionism.

Fortunately, this is almost impossible to articulate or teach. Think of our recent passion to characterise ‘Britishness’, in order that we might impress it into the psyches of the potentially British, to stop them becoming terrorists. We could have newly arrived immigrants being forced to sit in booths wearing headphones, writing an explication of ‘I Am the Walrus’.

The Britain of pop is the country I understand and like, partly because its music has never quite been domesticated. Neither parochial or patriotic, pop is an unusual identification, not one based on hatred, but on creativity.

Unlike identifications built on religion or on love of the state or the leader, it is forever shifting, still anarchic, cussed, rebellious, non-conformist. It is intelligent and witty, a running ironic description of contemporary British life.

‘Dad, Dad!’ is the familiar cry, the word I know I will hear most frequently this week. ‘Watch me!’

To one side of the small shingle beach in Deia is a high rock with a flat top on which the more intrepid children gather, daring each other, and themselves, to jump. One older boy hesitates for two hours, but when at last he goes over, screaming, the entire packed beach, seemingly inert under the boiling sun, bursts into applause like the audience at a TV ‘confession’ show.

Much to my surprise, my first son, a twin of eleven, who traverses the numerous perils of Shepherd’s Bush with caution, but otherwise has little contact with dangerous sports, leaps from the edge straight away. ‘The only way to go,’ as he puts it coolly, giving me five. But the other twin is up there for more than an hour, pacing worriedly, locked in his own existential panic, knowing he can’t climb down without considerable loss of pride.

After he goes over, my wife decides she cannot be excluded from this carnival of courage, brushing aside the men and boys rather regally, and dropping into the water with her toes pointing down and arms up. This shows a level of bravery which eludes her entirely later in the week, when she sits on a horse as we drift past vines and red earth, weeping and shaking, as her harmless horse munches on a bush and the rest of us cowboys stare at her in bewilderment.

I notice Bob Geldof is standing on the beach, too, watching the boys on the rock. He doesn’t mind a bit when questioned by a crowd of kids as to his mode of address to Snoop Doggy Dogg. (‘Is it plain Mr Dogg, Mr Doggy Dog, or just Snoop?’ ‘Snoop is fine.’ ‘What’s his real name then? Isn’t it Curtis?’ ‘I don’t think so, no.’)

Deia is a quiet and cute little town, with good bars and live music, many restaurants and a fine bookshop selling rare first editions, and without a shred of advertising anywhere; all the colour is natural. It is where Robert Graves finally settled after the war, and is now said to be full of ‘artists and writers’, as though that might increase its allure. I think it’s unlikely we’ll find a Sky dish in Deia; we’ll have to go elsewhere for football.