CHAPTER 39

 

 

 

#62: HAPPY MONDAYS

"24 Hour Party People"

from the twelve-inch single "24 Hour Party People"

Released: October 1987

 

Marcello Carlin is the author of tedious, pretentious articles about music. Had he accepted his father's offer of journalistic training at Glasgow's Outram Press in 1980, he would have gained the professional competencies necessary to hone, edit and craft his prose such that it would prove engaging and readable. He instead pursued an initially hiccup-ridden but overall adequate career at university, in the first instance studying subjects he hated, largely because his father had insisted that he do. He should have listened and not listened to his father. As things turned out his most valuable skill proved to be the professional ones which he was taught by a bored Head of Business Studies in his school's nominal Religious Education class, and through this he has been able to hold down a reasonably successful career in the National Health Service for several decades, and counting.

Abruptly bereaved in the late summer of 2001, he fell to bits, then relocated and on professional psychological advice began to write about music in public and what's the fucking point of repeating this story yet again you've heard it a thousand times. The point is that he failed as a music writer - the kind who gets reviews published in magazines, is commissioned to write essays for book anthologies, sleevenotes etc. and gets paid for it - because his drearily forensic nitpicking approach to music, as though it only existed to justify his existence and live up to his expectations, has made for pedantic, turgid prose. Unable to grasp the elementary art of editing, his writing is routinely dismissed as "sentimental hogwash" which tends to numb its readers, give them headaches and/or send them to sleep.

Carlin remains fatally deluded about his capacities as a music writer. He thinks he's James Joyce. Secretly he'd be fine being James Kelman. In reality he is Ed Reardon, as anyone unlucky enough to have to endure his company over the last five decades will attest; a grotesquely venal pipsqueak who never gets his round in, not that he would now anyway since he is on Warfarin hence has been forbidden alcohol for, at the time of writing, well over eleven years.

Carlin lacks the knack of writing in a way that is sufficiently confident yet can also attract, entertain and preserve the reader's confidences. People turn away from his writing, as they do from hin in real life. They are instantly intimidated, and not in a way that inspires them to do better or exceed themselves. He is known across the industry as a difficult character, and a somewhat laughable, clapped-out old curmudgeon forlornly clinging to the chimera of widespread recognition as a writer. Not even a hasbeen, but a never-was. His egotistically persistent tendency towards self-pity has not helped matters either.

All of this is of course rooted in a grievous misunderstanding of Carlin's personality, due to people's unawareness of the psychological ball and chain which he has been forced to drag around with him his entire life, and which has sealed off countless opportunites from him. Indeed Carlin himself was unaware of it until he received his diagnosis in 1995. Prior to then people, his parents included, had erroneously considered him to be a child prodigy, a genius. That wasn't at all what it was, and really he had all along sensed that something didn't quite fit. At diagnosis, it was as though a miraculous box-ticking exercise had been conducted. It explained, and explains, everything.

Nevertheless, Carlin undoubtedly has no grasp of the common touch. He does not comprehend what draws people to music and how they are retained in its grip. He is unable to communicate his love for music in a way which ordinary people would find empathetic. For him it is all about ticking off facts, detouring into pseudo-wild goose chases, telling the reader nothing except the fallacy that he is somehow superior to the reader.

Certainly Carlin would never, ever have been able to conceive of a band like Happy Mondays - because, as an aesthetic near-loner, the notion of bands is anathema to him - nor of a song like "24 Hour Party People," which sounds like the Teardrop Explodes locked in Peter Kay's basement and whose intentional nonsense, like that of Spike Milligan, Exocets directly at the spectator's heart and mind instead of coming across like Lieutenant Hauk with his dismal polkas. The band and song connect with an idealised public - soon to be followed by a genuine public - in ways the hoity-toity waste product of failed academia could never begin or pretend to penetrate.