William IV

William IV A King at Sea by Roger Knight, Penguin, 86 pages, £10.99

Penguin have long been the purveyors of good ideas for short books. Who remembers Penguin 60s, the simple little extracts that fitted neatly into a pocket for a quiet escape to the pub?

Beginning last year, they have set out to capture a short picture of every monarch from Athelstan (924-7) to Queen Elizabeth II. In doing so they have enlisted the penmanship of some of our finest writers. Philip Ziegler has written on GeorgeVI and David Cannadine on George V. Elizabeth II was awarded to Douglas Hurd. The project will be completed by 2018 when the aptly named Edmund King will write about Henry I.

They are attractive volumes, produced by Allen Lane, and easy enough to read in a day. I decided on William IV to dip my toe in the water because I had only read briefly about him and do not have the courage to embark on Philip Ziegler’s landmark study from forty years ago.

There is a reverence for some of the monarchs of the past, some of which is earned. The commonly held belief that Alfred was Great and Edward II was a disaster is difficult to shake. In this short study of William IV the author makes it quite clear that the life of Billy can be split into two stages: ignorant, loud-mouthed drunken buffoon, and more pleasant amenable but tired old king. The drunken years are by far the most interesting.

William’s father, George III, did things by the book. He educated his first son (later the Prince Regent and then George IV) in statecraft, and hated him with a vengeance. His second son, the idle and unpleasant Frederick, was bussed off to Germany to learn some diplomacy (a failure) and catch venereal diseases. William, as third son, was passed off at the age of thirteen to the Navy for the life of a sailor.

Roger Knight explains at length that William was a disaster. Promoted above his abilities because of his position in line to the throne, he needed skilled advisors to steer a course for him – many of whom he ignored. He spent years drinking in ports in the Caribbean, whoring, gambling, and generally being a nuisance. When the time came to step up and actually do something (Empire-building struggles against France and Spain) his chance to shine came but was prevented by his father. Indeed, the only redeeming feature of these years appears to have been the good relationship he built up with a young Nelson, by then preparing for greatness. William also cultivated a rather different relationship with Rachel Polgreen, a freed slave, in Bridgetown, Barbados.

There is some interesting content about the Reform Act, which came during William’s reign. He appears to have been able to steer a sensitive course through the initial stages of the attempt to widen the franchise, only to get cold feet halfway through. It defined his short reign, and he was in some ways the last monarch to wield any influence on parliament.

It is quite a skill to summarize a life in less than a hundred pages, and it makes it a very handy reference. The only thing missing, in my humble opinion, is a bit of detail about William’s many illegitimate children. With Dorothea Jordan he had ten children, and they are only alluded to briefly. Who knows how things might have gone if one of his legitimate heirs had survived?

I will be dipping next into the life of William II (Rufus), and I might even take him to the pub.

1971 Never A Dull Moment by David Hepworth

The premise of this book is something that is frequently discussed by music fans everywhere: which was the best year in rock? For many years I had a pet theory that the music that people hear in their fifteenth year tends to be the music for which they are most nostalgic. Quite a few friends have agreed. My fifteenth year wasn’t a particularly glorious one for popular music (I was sixteen in November 1989) but it still produced nuggets like Stones Roses, ‘New York’ by Lou Reed and ‘Full Moon Fever’ by Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers. Sadly it also was the year of Jive Bunny.

David Hepworth has produced a book that presents a compelling argument that 1971 was the year of years. Not 1967, or 1991, but 1971. He ticks off a number of reasons, and in the end is pretty convincing. He makes no apologies for the fact that he was twenty-one in 1971. ‘I was born in 1950,’ he says, ‘which means that in terms of music I have the winning ticket in the lottery of life.’

1971 was the first year of the post-Beatles Era, which might suggest that it was a poor choice for rock’s greatest year of all. However, Hepworth paints a colourful picture of quite how burnt out and un-Fab the Beatles had become by then, their lives filled with lawyers, mud-slinging and bitterness. Allen Klein was in his pomp. It was a miracle that individually they managed to produce any music at all. It was a pleasant surprise to all at the time that the best effort was George’s ‘All Things Must Pass’ (which appeared in 1970 but was doing good business in 71). The long view of hindsight helps everyone to see that George must have emerged from the shadows on Lennon and McCartney – it was not obvious at the time. In 1971 he also organised the Concert for Bangla Desh. It nearly bankrupted him.

With no Beatles, it was, as Hepworth puts it, ‘up for grabs’. He paints a great picture of Harry Nilsson as potentially the new Great White Hope. He would be the first in line, with many to follow.

What of The Stones?

By 1971, they were ready to jump ship. Taxation in the UK had reached such levels that they elected to live and work in the South of France, where Mick was married to Bianca on 12^th May. It was the year of ‘Sticky Fingers’, and the recording of ‘Exile on Main Street’. The Stones, he suggests, were at a crossroads of sorts, and from 1971 on the band became famous for being The Stones, and less for the music that they were writing and recording. The fact that they could headline Glastonbury at the age of seventy suggests he is right, and that everyone else has bought into the hype more comprehensively than even the accountants could have dreamed. The idea that 1971 was the birth of nostalgia in music is returned to and pondered several times, not least in the reporting of the strange encounter between Elvis and Nixon; and how Elvis had, by 1971, become his own tourist industry. The shape of things to come.

Even if you do not agree that 1971 was the greatest year, it is hard to say that it was not a busy one. There is so much to say that Hepworth has to prioritise. He travels month by month, focussing on two or three musicians in each. Bowie is given loving but not excessive attention (his star was still rising), as is the folky duskiness of Carole King, Joni and James Taylor. Elton John and the emergence of Rod the Mod, Cat Stevens and Marc Bolan are all skated across with warm affection.

Something this book does do well is explore the social setting into which the music was first heard. TV was nothing. Hollywood was jaded and dull. Music, and particularly the LP, was were ‘it was at’. Hepworth frequently returns to the way music was enjoyed – not consumed – first by reading about it in the music press, then absorbing all the details from the cover, then taking the plunge and making a purchase. He contrasts this to the saturated, on-tap way that all entertainment can be absorbed in the early twenty-first century. We have no anticipation any more.

Perhaps one fault is that the author also tries to look ahead and peak at what was just about to happen (like the birth of The Eagles and the inability to resist saying that Springsteen was just over the horizon). There was so much going on, a look ahead isn’t really needed.

Another strand of this book is an examination of how the long players were made. Studio time was expensive. There was no bedroom recording. As a result, many of the great records were rushed out, full of imperfections. He suggests that this is part of their success – just as the large cardboard LP covers frayed from many hours of playing, the rustic analogue nature of the sound is something much sought-after in our digital world.

‘There’s something about the recordings of 1971 that makes them sound more right almost fifty years later than they sounded at the time […] You can now buy invisible plug-ins for your desktop recording set-up that promise to make your record sound like ‘the big room’ at Olympic studios […] To all intents and purposes they’re selling the very air of 1971.’

This book is a feast for people really in love with music. At the end of each month there is a suggested play-list – a rather Q or Mojo approach – but it adds to the richness of the experience. The author cannot resist the temptation of ending with a final, more comprehensive list of the 100 albums that support his argument. It is a fantastic list. Perhaps it should form part of the GCSE music syllabus in this country.

Was 1971 any good, in the end? It was the year of ‘Imagine’, ‘What’s Going On’, ‘Tapestry’, ‘Led Zeppelin IV’, ‘L.A. Woman’, ‘Crazy Horse’, ‘Blue’, ‘Hunky Dory’ and ‘Surf’s Up’. I picked these albums randomly from the list of one hundred as they caught my eye.

Don’t take my word for it, as that is not what it is about. Go and have a listen.

Autonauts of the Cosmoroute, Julio Cortázar and Carol Dunlop, translated by Anne McLean in 2007, 1983

Every once in a while it is a pleasure to read a light, playful book as an antidote to all the Proust and Sartre in the world. 'Autonauts of the Cosmoroute' is just such a book. It has been a long time since I have read such a light, charming book. The premise is a simple one: Cortázar and his partner Carol Dunlop to travel from Paris to Marseilles in their red VW camper van, but instead of whistling along the highway as many of us would, they decided to stop at every parking facility: all sixty-six of them. They set themselves a rule: their first stop of the day was for a leisurely lunch, and the second (usually ten kilometres further on) was their stop for the night.

It is a simple idea that transforms the thought of motorway travel. None of us has the luxury of spending thirty-three days on a trip that should take two or three.

Most French drivers do it in one long slog. My father-in-law used to stop long enough to refuel, and my wife as a child remembers the opportunity for going to the toilet  was limited to the time it took to 'faire le plein' (fill up the tank). Julio was a short story writer and his wife a photographer, so they were in the privileged position of being able to stop, get out the garden chairs, listen to the birds singing and cook a good meal.

Cortázar wrote with humour and charm. This little travelogue was his last book: he was sixty-eight in the summer of 1982 and although candid about his health, he must have known that his time left was limited. He died two years later. A strand that weaves itself through the whole book is the delight and being alive: the taste of peaches, the sound of the skylark, and the joy of waking up each morning. He certainly seems to have been a man who appreciated the gift of his life.

To say Julio (nicknamed El Lobo, the wolf) and his partner Carol (La Osita, the little bear) were eccentric was an understatement. They shared a playful fantasy life with a vocabulary all of its own, in which Highway repairmen were spies sent to disrupt their Bohemian endeavours, and their little VW camper was a red dragon named Fafner, after Wagner. The details of each rest stop were meticulously noted (except when they forgot) and the quality of each lay-by is scientifically analysed. The shade provided by trees is a particular vote-winner (1982 seemed to be a particularly hot summer in southern France), as is the opportunity to drive a good distance from the hum of the motorway. Trucks with refrigeration units that park nearby and whir away all night brought the pair almost to distraction.

They were well organised: in a time before mobile telephones and the internet, they had to plan carefully for friends to meet them with supplies unobtainable at roadside shop like fresh bread and fruit. They arranged two such meetings with helpful friends and partied on each occasion.

The book is a surreal piece of writing. At times Cortázar rambles off to the backwoods of his mind. It is a largely pleasant place. His ponderings revealed a deep thinker, a sensitive soul and an imagination so vivid the writing would be more at home in 1967 than the early eighties. He was Argentinian, and based in Paris, but for British readers it is interesting to see that he too thought the Falklands / Malvinas escapade a folly.

Another quirky twist is that some of the writing is quite erotically charged - there are musings on the secret lives of drivers and passengers, and a few interesting little side-daydreams that perhaps a more private writer might have buried. There are also a nigh-on incomprehensible series of letters that are only loosely linked to the main exploits of the couple.

France in 1982 was a very analogue place - if that is the correct word to describe the opposite of digital. Flicking back to the photographs you are reminded how distinctive each car manufacturer was, and how much the world has changed. We have quickly become accustomed to carrying all the music we will ever need on phones, and every book on an e-reader.

In 1982 Cortázar and Dunlop sustained themselves with the few books that would fit in their camper van, and some symphonies on cassettes. They recorded their adventures on two lightweight portable typewriters. If you were to repeat the journey today, I am sure everything could be held on one device, and you would never be too far from an internet connection to check facts and upload your thoughts to the waiting world. Luddite that I am, I am nostalgic for such a world.

This book shows how observation of the mundane came become extraordinary if you give it time to develop in the mind. We have many luxuries in the twenty-first century, but the time to sit and watch seems for many not to be one of them.

This summer, whilst whizzing south-west (his journey was south-east) I shall try to notice more, and perhaps at a dreary rest-stop raise a glass to Julio Cortázar, the man who helped me to see things a little more intimately.