CHAPTER 76

 

 

#25: CONCHITA WURST

“Rise Like A Phoenix”

Single released: March 2014

 

 

It is that most fatal of existences, the contrarian who imagines themselves a visionary. Such should have been the expected sorrowful fate of Marcello Carlin. An outcast who felt that he was the only one in step, he was an embarrassment to the world of writing, and specifically that of writing about music.

 

Though thrown some cursory freelance work in the early 2000s, which he regarded with typically febrile arrogance, Carlin never became a known music writer. Keen on biting most hands that sought to feed him, he hid beneath a coiling carapace. During his most inglorious times, when he was a grieving, premature widower, he simply hurled gleeful bile at anyone who dared to come within fifty miles of him, or fifty inches of his beliefs.

 

And yet it could have been so different. Born in Dennistoun, Glasgow, in the early morning of Burns Night, 1964, he was able to speak at the age of six months and read at less than two years old. Significantly, he did not walk until eighteen months – an early warning that passed unheeded. Instead he was misdiagnosed as a child prodigy and experienced transient lionisation in the newspapers of the day. Since his parents were financially unable to provide him with the specialist tutoring he so badly and evidently needed, and as his then county council pitifully had no provisions for children who did not intend to grow up to become doctors, company directors or factory workers, he was sent to his local primary school and was immediately resented by his alleged peers for not being like them and for not going to church, not in that order.

 

Although Carlin academically performed quite well at the primary and downgraded grammar schools which he was compelled to attend, he was far from the best or most intelligent pupil in his year. Certainly he felt that his fellow pupils and teachers resented or at best merely tolerated him. He developed the persona of the school joker to avoid getting beaten up. When about midway through his third year at secondary school, others realised that he was not really ever going to grow up, and became embarrassed by his presence and even his existence – as did his father, who regularly and violently took things out on him and his mother. But because his father presented such a diligently placid and professional front to others, nobody suspected what was going on, and even if they did they would usually find a way to blame Carlin himself, for goading his father, as opposed to the capital crime of existing.

 

Any ounce of self-confidence and belief that the young Carlin might have possessed was summarily and literally beaten out of him, and so he learned to turn in on himself and shut himself off from the rest of the world because doing that was less painful than presenting his True Self, which would have had him shot down instantly. Consequently most people ignored him, or were repelled by him, or pretended that he was a ghost.

 

He proceeded to university and then to a fairly successful professional career, about which latter he never spoke in public. He spent his younger days enjoying life and avoiding mortgages, not realising that he would be punished for doing both four decades later. His health failed him for reasons both genetic and personal; for many years his was a premature death waiting to happen.

 

Carlin’s music writing, however, was indisputably tiresome and pretentious. He had one vanity book published (The Blue In The Air, April 2011) as a last-minute substitute for another writer who declined the publisher’s offer. Apart from contributions to anthologies, none of which sold meaningfully, his writing chiefly appeared in the form of online blogs. He lacked original thought, preferring to recycle tiresomely-known information in long, languid trails of pedantic prose which gave publishers headaches and sent readers to sleep. He never learned how to edit his prose or express argumentative economy.

 

Set against that, though, is the argument that, despite the world turning on him on innumerable occasions, Carlin had it comparatively cushy. He survived life-threatening experiences which would have flattened anybody else; many people, some of them famous, considered him the world’s greatest music critic; his 2013 essay on ABC’s The Lexicon Of Love, which included significant contributions from Martin Fry himself, is now regarded as a set text; and he was perhaps the most influential and most imitated, if the least outwardly acknowledged, music writer of the last quarter-century. Learning from previous painful experience, his marriage can also be described as perfect.

 

Nevertheless, Carlin preferred, some would say was compelled, to remain crouched in the far shadows. Hopeless at selling himself, he allowed himself to be sold down the river. Never for him the magnificently purple retort of I am ALIVE and I am ME and shove you if you don’t like it. Also don’t move. For Christ’s sake don’t look triumphant. Striding right into that old assembly hall which is now somebody’s kitchen anyway and announcing who I always was, didn’t you see it, you fools, couldn’t you tell?

 

Nonetheless, he is survived, and survives.