This just ain’t rock n’ roll

Rounding off the year with a seasonal rant. A nine-year-old relative of mine now has a kindle (she also has a digi-cam, an iphone and other things I don’t know what they’re called). She also has a room full of books. What is the kindle for? ‘Everyone else in school has one.’ Are nine-year-olds really doing so much travelling and having such a problem with transporting all their reading material that they have kindles? Something is getting lost. Save the children!

I’m just a little irritable after the Christmas period with all those TV adverts I was subjected to – ‘You know what it’s like when you’re on the road without the net and the kids are going crazy wanting their facebook and youtube videos…’ That was actually said on a mobile phone advert. You’re without the net and the kids want their youtube videos ?? It reminds me that I gave a friend a beloved book of mine recently and she was enjoying it but had to skip to the end to find out what would happen. ‘It was a shame,’ she said, ‘because I was really enjoying it and now I’ve spoilt it for myself.’ It’s these five minute youtube entertainment fixes rewiring our brains!

This year I worked for a holiday home agency, and we busted our arses making everything perfect and clean so people could come to London and enjoy a holiday, and they would call up to say the wifi connection wasn’t working. I'd go to see them and the whole family, kids n' all, were sitting there with their laptops. You’re on holiday! Go to the goddam British Museum! We’ve stolen stuff from all over the world for you to see!

Don’t worry, I’m not really ranting, or if I am, I’m going somewhere more interesting now. I just read the groooovy autobiography of Keith Richards. Here was a boy with nothing. Without those electronic-gadget distractions he developed a love of music and went to a shop everyday to play on a guitar that he yearned to own.

Does that not tie in well at all? Think about it. On the one hand you have that. On the other you have a little girl in a room of video players and electronic games. Keith would own that guitar one day dammit, and when he did, he would cherish it like it was an extension of himself. He's a soulful guy, it's good to yearn sometimes. 

Keith and Mick Jagger met each other because Mick had an old blues record under his arm at a train station and they got talking. Imagine that, one of the most important meet-ups for twentieth century music and it was because one saw the other holding a piece of music. Could that happen today? Like-minded people these days hardly have a record shop or bookshop to meet in.

I recently discovered an old bookshop on Archway Road near my place. It looked like a nasty old thrift shop from the outside. I poked my nose in and it was beautiful, packed to the ceiling with antiquarian hardcovers and walls of classic pulp fiction... I picked up a lovely old James M Cain penguin and couldn’t wait to read this old dusty thing in my hand. I like the thought of all those great minds and writers sharing space and having their work in an old second hand bookshop. If their works are taken from our sight with no where to go but to float in cyberspace becoming more and more hazy we move closer to a world with no soul. 

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(Two weeks later)... Wow, Serenade is a bloody amazing book! Those old penguins don't have a description on the back of the novel and I went in blind. I never had any idea where this story was going until literally the last shocking page. Brilliant!