Walking with a friend a few days ago, we passed down King’s Stables Road, which runs around the west of Castle Rock, then passes under the King’s Bridge, right below the Castle. The bridge is an old, stone structure, with a long, tunnel-like arch, and this saxophonist was playing some cool jazz under it.
I’ve seen some musicians play here before, including another jazz player (possibly the same chap) – it isn’t the best for busking in terms of footfall, compared to nearby streets, but the acoustics of that long, stone arch are incredible, especially to an instrument like a sax. And it makes for a cool pic…
My chum and I had a nice stroll along the annual Edinburgh Canal Festival the other weekend – after days of rainy showers, the sun came out, hot and strong that weekend. The festival itself felt smaller than previous years, not least because the Raft Race, which is what started the whole thing (existing before th festival grew around it) is now taking place on a different date, so it felt like crowds were smaller, there were less stands and fewer bands etc (and it all finished fairly early in the afternoon compared to previous years)
That said, we still had a great time, had some nice food and drinks (someone was making proper, fresh fruit-filled Pimms, a perfect summer sunny day drink!), enjoyed some of the bands and browsed the stalls, while taking pics (my friend wanted a go with the camera too).
Band entertaining the crowds around Lochrin Basin, where the canal now ends
Jazz band I have photographed at previous Canal Festivals was back, with some swinging tunes!
I was delighted to see our smiling mermaid was back again this year. We pointed her out to some small kids near us, and she waved to them – their faces lit up!
Even the barges became stages for entertainment!
Kayak fun!!
Ball right in the net!!!
I rarely appear in front of the camera, preferring to be behind the lens, but my chum wanted a go with the camera and took this shot of me, with a child apparently growing out of my head!
One of my swan chums decided to join me!!
Light waves reflecting off the sunny water onto the curved underside of the old, arched, stone bridge
And a slo-mo video of the same, because it was kind of gently mesmerising.
The Extraordinary Miss Flower,
Directed by Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard,
Featuring Emilíana Torrini, Caroline Catz, with appearances by Nick Cave, Richard Ayoade, Alice Lowe, Siggi Baldursson, Sophie Ellis-Bextor
This is a delightfully unusual slice of cinema, that doesn’t fit into any neat, single category (no bad thing!). In 2024, the Icelandic singer Emiliana Torrini released her first new album in some time, Miss Flower, inspired by the find of a trove of letters, photographs, telexes and more by Emiliana and her friends Zoe and Simon. The correspondence belonged to Zoe’s late mother, Geraldine Flower.
They revealed years of a fascinating, secret life – romances, intrigues, international travel, even hints of possible links to espionage. This deeply inspired Torrini, who worked with her long-term collaborator, Simon Byrt, to use these as the basis for her 2024 album (which I highly recommend), but it also felt like it had more to explore, which lead to this intriguing film work with Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard, who previously brought us the fascinating 20, 000 Days on Earth documentary about Nick Cave.
This isn’t quite a documentary, nor a regular narrative film, nor musical, but partakes of elements of all of these and more. At its core are performances of songs from the album by Torrini and her group, and dramatic scenes and readings, with an array of famous actors and musicians reading from some of the letters, while Caroline Catz plays the role of Geraldine Flower, often in a sort of conversation with Torrini, asking her about her intriguing life, about the events and the people in the letters, of life, and, of course, of love.
Choreographer Kate Coyne arranges some wonderful visual movements while Forsyth and Pollard use clever framing, little pieces of animation, set dressing and other tricks to craft something that is as visually appealing as the music and voices. Throughout it all Catz’s depiction of Geraldine is magnetic and charming and assured – it’s not hard to see why so many of the letters to her were from men clearly in love with this unusual woman – and Torrini herself, who displays an engaging charm, and radiates an energy that makes it quite clear that she is really enjoying herself in this story.
Of course, you may ask, this is all very well for someone like me who is a fan of the musician already, but what if you are not overly familiar with Emiliana Torrini’s work? Perhaps you’ve never listened to her albums, but have heard her eerie, haunting rendition of Golem’s Tale for the Lord of the Rings soundtrack. But even if you are unfamiliar with her work, this is still an intriguing and delightful piece of film and music for anyone who is interested in how a creative person is inspired, how they and others around them come together to make art, a little glimpse inside the creative process, but handled in a very warm, playful manner that left me smiling.
The Extraordinary Miss Flower premiered at the London International Film Festival, and will be opening in UK and Irish cinemas from May 9th. Thanks to the BFI for kindly arranging a preview screener for us.
Edinburgh International Film Festival 2023 – Tokyo Pop,
Directed by Fran Rubel Kuzui,
Starring Carrie Hamilton, Diamond Yukai (aka Yutaka Tadokoro), Hiroshi Kobayashi, Hiroshi Sugita, Satoshi Kanai, Rome Kanda
The Edinburgh film fest usually includes some retrospectives of older films, as well as showcasing new work, and even with the very slimmed down festival we’re having this August (after us almost losing the festival last autumn, as we covered, I’m just grateful we have it at all, frankly) there was still room for some older gems, including this 1980s piece, which somehow I had never come across before.
Tokyo Pop, created in 1988, was the first directing gig for Fran Rubel Kuzui, who I am sure many of you will know for her association with Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel, and Fran was at the festival, talking with the audience after the screening, explaining at one point how damned hard it was for a woman to become a Hollywood director back in the 80s, even on a small budget, Indy film (the gender ratio is still bad today, but back then, even worse).
It’s a deceptively simple story – an American woman, Wendy Reed (the late Carrie Hamilton) is fed up with being relegated to backing singer duties by useless rock and roll boyfriends in 80s New York. When a postcard from Japan arrives from her friend who is staying there, saying “wish you were here”, and adding that the Japanese youth love American rock culture, she decides to take her friend at her word and go there, with no plan, no skill in Japanese, not even a map of Tokyo, just a vague plan of becoming a music star there.
The cultural fish out of water scenario is compounded when she arrives to find her friend has already moved on and is now in Bangkok, leaving her trying desperately to find somewhere to stay and to get a job so she can get some money. Her “exotic” gaijin (foreigner) looks help her get a job in a hostess bar – it helps pay the bills, but it’s not exactly the rock and roll fame she was seeking. Meanwhile Hiro (actor and rock star Diamond Yukai) and his band is struggling to get noticed by the local big producer or land paying gigs.
Their first encounter with Wendy goes badly when Hiro’s less than expert grasp at English leads him to misunderstand the situation when she tells him she needs a hotel for the night, and he thinks she means one of the city’s many “love hotels”. Such comic misunderstandings are part and parcel of this kind of tale, and we all know that sooner or later they are going to become close, and that she will be the thing that makes their band stand out, especially in an 80s Japan that was always hungry for new fads.
In some ways Tokyo Pop is of its time – this was the 1980s, and this would fit nicely into an evening of 80s viewing with some John Hughes flicks, and of course the styles and music mark the era. And yet at the same time it feels very fresh – it’s that cultural misunderstanding Schick which is still funny (and goes both way, not just her ignorance of Japan, but the Japanese characters attempting Western rock without really understanding it). It’s a bit drama, it’s a bit romantic-comedy, it’s a bit musical, but mostly it is just a charming delight of a film, the two main leads radiating that youthful, naïve confidence, lighting the screen up with huge smiles and a tremendous sense of fun and pure charm. A total delight, now restored into 4k.
I study nuclear science
I love my classes
I got a crazy teacher
He wears dark glasses
Things are going great, and they’re only getting better
I’m doing alright, getting good grades
The future’s so bright, I gotta wear shades
I gotta wear shades
I’ve got a job waiting for my graduation
Fifty thou a year’ll buy a lot of beer
Things are going great, and they’re only getting better
I’m doing alright, getting good grades
The future’s so bright, I gotta wear shades
I gotta wear shades
Well I’m heavenly blessed and worldly wise
I’m a peeping-tom techie with x-ray eyes
Things are going great, and they’re only getting better
I’m doing alright, getting good grades
The future’s so bright, I gotta wear shades
I gotta wear shades
Timbuk3.
People watching along the Union Canal on a very warm, sunny, spring evening, so many people in sunglasses, which always makes me think of the classic 80s pop song, “Future’s So Bright, I Gotta Wear Shades” by Timbuk3.
I’ve a long-standing love for jazz, and for Noir, so when an advance copy of Jake Lamarr’s “Jazz Noir” landed at our bookshop, my colleague thought of me right away, and she was right! Covering Harlem from the mid 1930s to the early 1960s, we follow Clyde Morton, who is soon given the moniker “Viper” (not so much for cold-blooded, snake-like behaviour, it’s the hissing sound as he takes a drag on a reefer, the drug of choice of the jazz musicians in Harlem.
We first meet Viper in the 60s, and in flashbacks we get his earlier life – convinced by an old uncle that he can be a great musician, he eventually leaves his home in the rural South to head for New York, just another wide-eyed rub in the big city, ending up in Harlem, drinking in the vibrant African American culture, especially the music of the era, jazz. He is soon disabused of his ideas of musicianship by a friendly but honest musician who runs the shows at a busy venue, who tells him the unvarnished truth – he’s terrible.
But he does help him get an entry-level job, and he soon catch the eye of Mr O, the big boss who runs the club and the drugs sold there, and it isn’t long before he works his way up the ranks, from the muscle to a rusted lieutenant and higher. He also earns a reputation that ensures that nobody will mess with him, in the best Hard Boiled tradition, and we see this take place in the multiple flashbacks from the older Viper, reflecting on the path of his life from the 1960s, as the world has changed around him, and, while enjoying success he’s not sure he’s truly found happiness.
While the story of Viper is engrossing, it’s the atmosphere Lamarr conjures which really draws you right into the book. Right from Viper’s first arrival as the country boy amazed by the big city – not just the size and the bustle of it all, he’s not used to seeing and hearing much of the culture from African-American people, and here it is, the beating heart of it in the 30s Harlem. He even sees a black police officer, which is astonishing to this young man from the Deep South.
As we follow Viper through the decades, we see the world change around him – forced into wartime service, he returns in 1945 to find things different. The jazz scene may still be king, but mainstream white culture has been appropriating it, with busy clubs in different parts of the city, where once they all came to Harlem, although Harlem is still the heart of it, and the African-American musicians all come back to the clubs there after playing the white clubs in Midtown and elsewhere.
The music itself has changed – the Big Band era is giving way to Bepop and new styles, there are different strains of weed being smoked, but also heroin (the drug that would eventually kill Charlie Parker), which Viper refuses to sell. Real characters like Theolonius Monk, Duke Ellington and Miles Davis appear – you don’t have to be a jazz fan to follow the main narrative, these real historical figures are largely background, but if you are a jazz fan it adds to the atmosphere, and also to the feel of the world changing around Viper, as the music and the musicians (who rely on him for their drugs) change.
And of course there’s a woman – in Noir there is always a woman, and that woman is often a mix of alluring, irresistible and may also lead to disaster. Viper keeps himself in tight control, but sometimes there’s a woman you just can’t quite get over no matter what happens. An excellent, jazz-infused Noir, dripping with atmosphere.
Viper’s Dream is published by No Exit Press on the 20th of April
And another review from this year’s Edinburgh International Film Festival…
Buddy Guy: the Blues Chase the Blues Away
Directed by Devin Chanda, Matt Mitchener, Charles Todd
Chanda, Mitchener and Todd’s excellent documentary one arguably the greatest living Blues legend, George “Buddy” Guy, opens, appropriately enough with Buddy himself revisiting Lettsworth, Louisiana, where he was born way back in 1936. Like the great Johnny Cash, his parents were poor share-croppers, and he grew up picking cotton by hand, slowly being introduced to music as he grew up, through friends and relatives bringing over instruments to play at get-togethers, or when they finally got hold of a record player; he knew when he heard the music that he wanted to make his own, but of course he could have no idea that it would ever become a lifelong career, let alone one so long, successful and influential. As the now eighty-something Buddy looks back over those fields where he grew up, we’re taken back along his long journey.
Working whatever low-paying jobs he could get after leaving home for Baton Rouge, he continued to practise his guitar and soon was noticed, picking up some work with bands in the city, but eventually he moved to the Windy City, Chicago, in 1957, one of the great spiritual homes of Blues music. As Buddy tells it to the camera, back then the city was teeming with Blues bars, many of them free to enter – only drinks cover charge – making them accessible to pretty much anyone, an absolute feast of live music, right place, right time, and its here he came to the attention of Blues God Muddy Waters, as well as, eventually, the famous Chess Records label, although as he and others note, although Chess used him in recording sessions with others, they refused to record him doing his own now unique style.
As Buddy recalls with a laugh, most Blues players would play sitting down, but he stood up, moved about energetically, bent the guitar strings about as far as they can go without breaking to create interesting, new sounds, wasn’t afraid of some feedback, he could be a wild man with a guitar and a song when playing live. It’s not hard to be reminded of Jimi Hendrix in this regard. But Chess just didn’t get it, and while Buddy stuck to his work ethic of plugging in and playing pretty much every night, outside of a small circle he wasn’t getting the wider attention because they wouldn’t record him playing in that live style.
As the turbulent 60s rolled on and then the 70s, his influence was still getting out there to a select few though – among them new talent from across the Pond, in Britain, people like Mike Jagger, Keith Richards, Eric Clapton and more, and these increasingly famous musicians were very open about their Blues influences and how it fed into their rock’n’roll style, and about musicians like Buddy, or Howling Wolf, Muddy Waters or John Lee Hooker, paying their respects to the people who inspired and influenced them. And of course they mentioned them when they came to perform in the US, incredulous that so many into music didn’t know of these creators right on their own doorstep, and naturally this got a lot of youngsters thinking, who are these guys Clapton and Richards are talking about and how do I hear their music?
That theme of inspiration and legacy is key to much of this documentary – just as these now global stars like the Stones paid tribute to Buddy (there are some wonderful scenes of them jamming in his club in the early 70s, and Buddy and Guy playing around each other on stage decades later, the looks of pure joy on their faces is a delight, it’s not rock stars, it’s just mates making music together), Buddy takes great care to pay very sincere respect to his inspirations, and the pleasure on his face even now in his 80s as he talks about meeting John Lee Hooker – whose music he used to practise to as a youngster – just shows unvarnished joy. That legacy is also paid forward, not just backwards, with new, young musicians who have grown up and carrying on the Blues tradition, in their own styles but all influenced by Buddy’s playing, and he is clearly delighted – the legacy he inherited from the players before him, all now gone, is passed on, even when he’s no longer here the Blues will live on.
The film is beautifully crafted – the directors talked after the film (via Zoom, in-person appearances and travel not very easy at this year’s festival, as you can imagine) about how they had to rethink some of the filming because after the planning stage, Covid hit, and everything had to change from their original idea of following Buddy on tour (until Covid, despite his age, Buddy still did around 130 gigs a year around the world). They talked about being able to get hold of people like Clapton and Santanna to talk about Buddy’s influence on their playing when they started out, about the struggle to find archive footage and photographs. Later stuff is a little easier, with recordings, photos, even footage, but early images, well, nobody had a camera documenting their life as rural share-croppers in the 30s, so they turned to a painter they’d seen in a leaflet Buddy himself had in his house, Earl Klatzel, who had covered that period, and his imagery fitted in perfectly to their Covid-revamped filming plan.
This is a wonderful documentary, going through the good times and the rough, but mostly it is joyful, celebrating the work of a musical legend, and the enormous influence his work has had on so many other performers. Even if you’re not a Blues fan, there’s a big chance some of your favourite musicians have been inspired by Buddy’s work, he’s a musician’s musician. And if you are a Blues fan, then this is Blues heaven for you, an amazing life story and a banquet of fantastic music. This is the sort of music documentary that makes you want to go home and spin some of your favourite vinyl for hours. And the film circles around nicely, back to that opening of Buddy as he is now, back looking at the fields where he grew up in the 30s, but he’s here not just for nostalgia, or for the documentary, but because they are naming the nearby road after him, complete with historical plaque, giving him his dues as a local lad done good.
And that title: well, that’s Buddy. As he explains in the film, you can’t just sing the Blues, you have to have lived the life and have it inside your soul; you have to have the Blues, not just play it. Funny thing is, he comments with a big grin, is that when you’re playing it, the Blues go away and you feel better: the Blues chase the Blues away…
Loving this – Orkestra Obsolete plays pop classic “Blue Monday” using 1930s instruments, old equipment and bits and pieces like wine glasses and a musical saw. Fabulous:
“It’s 106 miles to Chicago, we’ve got a full tank of gas, half a pack of cigarettes, it’s dark, and we’re wearing sunglasses.…”
Spotted while walking along the lovely beach at North Berwick, one of the houses which is built right by the beach has a decked area a few feet above the beach, and in this small back garden spot who is sitting there, enjoying the sea view but Jake and Elwood, the Blues Brothers!!! Made me smile…
Bohemian Rhapsody, Directed by Bryan Singer and Dexter Fletcher, Starring Rami Malek, Lucy Boynton, Joseph Mazzello, Ben Hardy, Gwilym Lee, Tom Hollander, Aiden Gillen, Allen Leech, Aaron McCusker
Alright, before I start I should hold up my hand and say I am a massive Queen fan. Always have been, so much so that I had to restrain myself from standing up and joining in the actions for some of the musical numbers on offer in Bohemian Rhapsody (nobody needs to see that in public and besides, save it for the special sing-a-long screening). I’m not sure if that means I was likely to be more critical of any film about Freddie and the boys or more easily accepting though. The film, as many of you will know, arrives with a somewhat troubled production history, not least the departure (willing or forced, gossip still circles) of Bryan Singer and a pause on filming, before Dexter Fletcher came on board to finish it. That’s the sort of signs that a movie may be a turkey; I’m glad to say that I didn’t find this the case here.
We open with the band about to get ready to appear on stage at one of the great music events of history – the global-audience of Live Aid, now a legendary gig, with, many would argue, Queen’s electrifying performance being the boost the massive live show needed – before looping back to the early 70s. Young Farrokh Bulsara (Mr Robot’s Rami Malek) is working a low-end job at Heathrow Airport and subject to racial slurs from his colleagues. At home he’s restless, chafing at elements of his Zanzibar and religious upbringing and eager to embrace music culture, escaping at night to watch gigs. It’s there he sees Roger Taylor (Ben Hardy) and Bryan May (Gwilym Lee) playing with their three-piece band Smile.
When their singer leaves the band, commenting it is going nowhere, Farrokh – now calling himself Freddie – introduces himself to the band and charms his way into joining them through a mixture of self-confidence and bravado, the embryonic elements that Freddie, when he adopted the Mercury surname, would later channel to such fantastic effect on stage to capture live audiences with some huge success. With bass player John Deacon (Joseph Mazzello) joining, and the band changing its name to the grander (and outrageous, as Freddie said) Queen, the classic quartet is set to take on the world, with the film taking in chunks of their career in short bites, recording that first album, the iconic Night at the Opera, the eponymous Bohemian Rhapsody epic track itself, through to the mid 80s and the triumphant Live Aid appearance.
Of course there are flaws, some I would argue are pretty much unavoidable – this is a feature film, not a documentary, so some elements are a little different from parts you may have read in biographies or seen in documentaries, and there is simply no way to do justice to every part of the Queen story, they had a twenty year career at the top of the charts, and you can’t cover everything that happened (for instance we don’t see anything about those post Live Aid albums made as Freddie was dying), you can’t even cover the making of every album and still have a watchable feature film, that’s more for a multi-part documentary. You may argue at some of the moments they decided to include over others, but that would be the case whichever periods of their story they put in or left out.
The film picks out some moments from that career and tries to keep a balance between the show-business moments and the personal lives, including Freddie’s growing realisation that he was gay or bisexual (although it also makes clear how that never changed his lifelong love for Mary Austin, played by Lucy Boynton, including his touching dedication to her of the song “love of my life”), the arguments between the band members, management, labels, the press. But it also includes the good personal moments, most notably the friendship of the four band members that survives fame, success, ego trips, drugs, manipulative hangers-on and more, and remained the core of their identity right to the end of Freddie’s life. We get snapshots of their albums being worked on or their tours, including that amazing moment in Rio (then the largest audience for a live show) where the huge audience sang back to the band, a wonderful moment when they realise how much their fans have taken them to their hearts, with the lion’s share of time given to the Live Aid performance. And it includes nice touches such as Freddie’s beloved cats.
While Hardy, Lee and Mazzello do sterling work essaying Taylor, May and Deacon very well, the film concentrates unashamedly on Freddie, understandably given the wonderfully flamboyant front-man’s theatrical persona and his personal life. And whatever you think of which parts of the band’s career that they chose to show or any other aspects of the film, it is hard to deny just how damned good Rami Malek is as Freddie. It isn’t just the strong physical resemblance (aided by some prosthetics such as the extra teeth Freddie had which gave his mouth that unusual shape), or adopting Freddie’s unique voice, it is right in the core of Malek’s performance, he channels his inner Freddie, the mannerisms, expressions, movements, to a remarkable degree. I’ve read that Malek was determined to do justice to such an amazing performer and was aware how important he was emotionally to a massive number of fans, and by god that determination is there in every frame. It is an astonishing piece of acting, and as with his powerful work in Mr Robot is marks Malek as a young actor we should all be keeping an eye on. He looks as if he could command an audience just like the real Freddie could.
And yes, I did manage to restrain myself to the end, I didn’t stand up and join in the actions for We Will Rock You or Radio Ga Ga. But I think if there is a sing-a-long screening (and I am sure a number of places will do that, somehow!) then I may have to go along and join in unashamedly.
“What if drugs help you to find the thing that makes you special?”
Ellie and Skip meet in the group therapy sessions at the addiction clinic they’ve been committed to, one of those “circle of truth” approaches many therapists seem to love and pretty much everyone else hates. And like many such groups, the “true” stories the patients are made to share are frequently less true than the therapists would like to think – addicts and their ability to lie to suit their circumstances are an integral part of this tale; you really can’t trust what they say about themselves, their past, their motivations.
Which offers up the reader a pretty interesting dilemma – we’re presented with these oh-so-young characters, and we can’t entirely trust what we learn about them. While that is quite a clever device for generating suspense and intrigue for the reader (no godlike narrator who tells the reader everything, we have to take bits and pieces and try and decide which are true), it could also have been a problem. After all, if you can’t be sure what the characters are really like, how can you start to buy into them, empathise with them? It’s an approach which could alienate the readers, but this is Brubaker and Phillips we’re talking about, and they take that potentially double-edged approach and use it quite brilliantly; despite, or perhaps even because we can’t trust their accounts of themselves I found these characters utterly irresistible.
To begin with this feels like the classic star-crossed lovers, a young woman, a young man, pushed together by unusual circumstances, bonding not just through their shared youth but the confinement and the rules of the sanatorium, chafing at them, leaving them eager to strike out against those rules and authority figures. Romeo and Juliet by way of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Those rebellions start small – stealing the head doctor’s cigarettes while she is being lectured (a nice touch, the person telling her how to beat her addiction and how wrong it is to indulge thinks nothing of puffing away on her own addictive thrill while doing so), sneaking out of the building at night to smoke, talk, to make out. Romance and an up-yours to the authority figures at the same time.
This is beautifully handled – Phillips brings just perfect little touches to the visuals, such as a close up on Ellie’s face during the group therapy, her inner dialogue contrasting with what is being openly said in the group session, her gaze catching Skip’s as someone else talks, the expression just perfectly rendered, an elfish, knowing smirk that captures in a single panel how she’s feeling at that moment (as she admits to being a bad influence and having no plans to change), then the following visual interchange between them as the group and therapist continue unaware.
That rebellion will grow, however – sure these are young lovers, full of screw-you attitude, and it is easy to go along with their joie-de-vivre, to hell with the consequences approach. There’s always something intoxicating about that youthful rebellion and we-know-better-than-everyone pose. Except we know there are consequences, and, as noted earlier, these are addicts, we can’t entirely trust their motivations or their life stories. Not everything or everyone is what they seem here, and there will be some revelations, some may not be what you might imagine, although I shall say no more on that front for fear of spoilers.
“I guess Billie Holiday is where it started.”
Threaded through all of this is a love of music, of how important music is in many of our lives, how sometimes it feels like a singer has written those lyrics just for us, the soundtrack to moments of our lives. And particularly here so much of the music Ellie loves was created by performers who struggled with addiction. There is a morbid sort of glamour to that, and come on, any of us who love music know that, we’ve felt it – actually we’ve felt it not just with music but with poetry, prose, pretty much every artform humans have crafted has been touched by those who have indulged, many argue for the better.
There are shades of the late, great Bill Hicks here on his stand-up diatribe on the War On Drugs, where he acknowledges the damage drugs can do but also notes how nobody picks up on the other side of it, like the stunning music that came out of some of that psycho-chemical experimentation, the old kicking open the Doors to Perception. There’s a fascination, even a sort of sick romance about all of that, especially tied to that spirit of youthful rock’n’roll rebellion, most of us have felt it, maybe even flirted with it even if just in imagination while blissing out to that music. Ellie tells the therapist as much when it is her turn to talk in the group sessions.
Like Welsh’s Trainspotting though, this book doesn’t glamourise drug use, it shows the mess it can and does make of lives, but it also, like Trainspotting, shows the highs and why they are so attractive – addictive. My Heroes Have Always Been Junkies doesn’t get on the soap-box to preach condemnation, nor does it paint that lifestyle as overly romantic, it mixes both, showing that just like everything else in our lives the positive and negative aren’t always clearly separated, they can be messy, intertwined. That theme is in itself attractive and compelling, but here it is just the garnish to an engrossing story, with shifting sands beneath the changing characters that draw you in deep. It’s simply brilliant. And you’re really, really going to want to make a good playlist to go along with your second reading. I’m starting with some Billie…
