Jay Stringer's Blog, page 11

Audio- The Lost Profits

Here’s an audio version I recorded of The Lost Profits. It’s a prequel to my novel Old Gold, but it’s not essential. Only one of the characters in the story makes an appearance in the novel, and it doesn’t tie into the main plot in any essential way (as an Easter egg, though, the events of this story do have a relationship to the main mystery in Old Gold, and bonus points to the first person who tells me what it is.)

As ever you can order the novel from Amazon, and have it in either shiny paperback or magic ebook.

The Lost Profits

The Way Of The Gun

“Not money. Fifteen Million dollars. Money is what yo take to the grocery store. It’s what you get out of the ATM. Fifteen Million dollars is not money.”

I just re-watched The Way Of The Gun. I last saw it about ten years ago. I liked it, but I couldn’t have given you any reason why. This was also at a time when I thought Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction were the dog’s bollocks, and I loved The Usual Suspects.

A decade on, and my tastes are different. In some cases those years have thrown things at me that have changed my world view. In others, I’ve simply come to expect different things from a crime film. The biggest change, I suppose, is that now I’m a crime writer myself, and I have a more analytical view of story-telling. I can’t sit through Reservoir Dogs or Pulp Fiction. I still have a lot of love for The Usual Suspects, but it seems to me that what I like about it is different to what pop culture remembers it for. Despite these changes -or perhaps because of them- I found that I liked The Way Of The Gun far more than before. I can also give reasons.

The main reason? It’s a crime film.

It’s a film about crime and criminals. It’s not an excuse for a director to play some hip music from the past and to show off some witty dialogue. It’s not violence or revenge porn. It’s not a film with any telegraphed tricks up it’s sleeve. It’s a crime film. And crime can get nasty. It can get dirty and bloody.

It seems to me that we all spend a certain amount of time hiding from that. I’ve written before about the tourism aspect of crime fiction. The fantasy. We can be guided through some murky waters by a strong protagonist, wrapped up in some witty banter, and escape unharmed. There’s a very safe feeling to a lot of crime fiction, which seems to me to defeat the purpose.

Hot off the Oscar winning success of The Usual Suspects, screenwriter Chris McQuarrie thought that all the doors would be opening for him. He was a young writer with a ton of ideas and a little gold statue that said people should listen to them. But nobody did. Hollywood was only interested in his ideas if they came wrapped in a neat little bundle that looked, sounded, and packaged like The Usual Suspects. So if Hollywood was demanding another crime film from him, he decided he would give it to them. All the way.

The film was very much a reaction against the genre fare of it’s time. The cameras stepped back and got out of peoples faces. The editing slowed down, the scenes played longer. The violence, when it happened, was nasty and had consequences. Watching it a decade removed from it’s context, all of these choices still stand out, but I think rather than feeling reactionary they make the film feel far more timeless than it’s contemporaries.

It’s not a film without problems, though. McQuarrie makes a few structural choices that cause the film to feel a little too self conscious at first. Rather than committing to it’s tone from the outset, he tries to lure the audience in with a bait and switch. It starts out making a play at being the very kind of film that McQuarrie was acting against, with a loud Rolling Stones track, some funny dialogue, and some cool looking characters. We see Benicio Del Toro and Ryan Phillippe, and we know them, they’re film stars, so they must be our heroes. Then the ‘cool crime film’ is interrupted as Del Toro and Phillippe, surrounded by a crowd who are out for their blood, start the fight by punching the two women of the group. They get their assess handed to them and the film has told half of it’s story right there- these guys are not nice, but they’re what we’ve got. Also, they may lose, but they’ll go down fighting, and they’ll find a way to mess you up as they fall. For the next few scenes we have an uncomfortable battle between the two different tones. Some moments commit fully to the bleak realism, while others are still trying to play it cool with some overly stylised dialogue. There’s a scene in a sperm-donor clinic that’s not as funny as it thinks it is, and then an exposition scene in the waiting room that belongs in a much weaker film. If McQaurrie had been a little more experienced a director, and a little more sure of his voice, he may well have simply committed to the bleak tone from the outset and stuck with it.

Once we get past these early problems though, the film finds it’s feet and never looks back. The Way Of The Gun may not be quite the Peckinpah masterpiece that it seems to be aiming for, but we still get a classic crime film that’s ageing better than most.

Del Toro and Phillippe play two career criminals who, “for the record,” shall be known as ‘Mr Longbaugh’ and ‘Mr Parker.’ They hatch a plan that involves kidnapping a pregnant Juliette Lewis to make a quick buck, before finding out that they’ve picked a fight with the mob. We already know how this goes from seeing them pick a fight with two women in a crowd of men. They’re in all the way, there is no going back, and nothing is going to go smoothly.

Something else that probably sailed straight over my head a decade ago is that the film isn’t really Longbaugh or Parker’s story. They are our way in and out, our framing device, but really it’s James Caan’s character, Joe Sarno, who is the centre of the tale. To say more than that would be to ruin the story for anyone who hasn’t seen it, but I will say his performance is note perfect.

The narrative unfolds as if there was a studio executive at McQuarrie’s shoulder while he wrote the script, but every time the exec told him to turn right, he turned left. Each chance to lighten the mood is passed up in favour of making it darker. Each chance to veer the course back into being a hip and cool crime film is ignored in favour of following the rules of cause and effect.

By the time we reach the climactic gun fight, we have found a very different form of tension. This isn’t a scene in which we’re rooting for good guys against bad guys and hoping someone comes out of it alive, this is a scene in which we’re already convinced everyone is fucked and are simply wondering who is going to get hurt the most. If people get shot, they fall down. If someone does a Hollywood stunt jump across the screen, they’re going to land hard on broken glass.

I think McQaurrie is returning to directing now with a Lee Child adaptation and then an action film. I’m not sure what I’ll get out of his upcoming projects, but i know that in The Way Of The Gun I found an often overlooked classic. It’s a shame that the years in between haven’t given us more of his films, because I think he would have gone on to do even better. This was very much the project of a young man finding his voice, and I think it could or should have been followed with some stone-wall classics.

 “You know what I’m gonna tell God when I see him? I’m gonna tell him I was framed.”

 Reminder; Jay’s debut novel OLD GOLD is available for pre-order now. You can join his mailing list here. He promises to stop talking about these two things -and in third person- someday soon. Or never. 

No Place For You To Be A Girl

I’m returning to a theme I’ve looked at before, so I won’t outstay my welcome on it. Yesterday Professor Weddle tweeted a link to this interview with Liz Meriwether, the creator of New Girl. I don’t know if I’ll lose any noir points for saying this, but I’ve been really enjoying New Girl. I didn’t expect to; I’m very selective when it comes to sitcoms and rarely find ones that I enjoy. But the show has heart, which is it’s secret weapon, and manages to be funny more often than not.

When the show came out it caught a lot of heat on the Internet. People wanted to analyse what statement the show was making, and what the characters signified about modern gender politics. Writers lined up to declare the show as some form of battleground, and to make a series of thinly disguised personal comments about the shows female lead.

In all the debates, discussions, and snark, it would have been easy to forget that we were discussing a television sitcom rather than a political manifesto.

 

It touches on something I’ve written about before. When the Internet (and the broadsheet media) took issue with perceived misogyny in an episode of SHERLOCK. I questioned whether it was fair to judge writers based on what happens in their stories. I also wondered whether people want writers to write the world as it is or as they think it should be, and if Internet critics could tell the difference.

 

 

But this interview with Meriwether really boiled down the issue far better than I could. Here’s the bit I mean;

The characters don’t have to be symbols of a bigger movement. I feel like we are really past that.

That really says most of what needs to be said, right? But the interview also covers a little more ground. Does the show attract more snark because it’s female lead? I’m tempted to say yes, but not in the expected old fashioned way. I think it attracted the snark because of baggage that people brought to it, and which had nothing to do with the show itself.

I’d argue, and I think perhaps the interview informs this too, that there is a tendency to read a female character as the writers definitive statement on feminism and gender politics. That’s a hell of a lot of pressure to place on a character and a story.

Presenting well-rounded female characters in our work is vital. But there’s a difference between someone wanting to pick up a book and feel represented in the text, and someone wanted to pick up a book and expecting a character in the text to represent all of their sex/race/gender/species/shoe size.

I think what we saw with the fuss over New Girl is that there are still a great many people who don’t feel represented in the media, and still a great many rules in place as to how these things can be done. And we feel echoes of these things in our writing. But I also think it shows that there is too much pressure placed on female characters, and to be honest, I think we’d be doing far more to encourage well written female roles by removing these pressures and formulas from the conversation and simply promoting interesting characters.

Let’s work towards a better balance in our fiction by stripping these barriers away, not adding to them.

 ***

Aaaaaaaaaand now that I’ve gone and stuck my toe into that little hornets nest, how about I close off with something completely different?

You may have seen on the twitters that I’m running an easy competition at the moment. I’ll be doing a few things over the next few months in advance of OLD GOLD, but straight out the gate I’m giving away 5 signed copies. For Free. Free stuff? We like free. All you need to do to enter the draw is to join my mailing list. I’ll leave the competition running until this time next week, then draw the five winners at random from my mailing list. Tell your friends. Tell your granny. Tell those guys in African countries who keep emailing you about money (sorry, I know we need to retire that joke, but once more, okay?). I want to send these books to folks who love crime fiction, but I would also like to send them to as many different places as possible. a real spread would be fun. I’ll have more cool things for people on my mailing list between now and the book’s release.

Sparrow And Crowe: The Demoniac Of Los Angeles

“Do you believe in the Devil?”

“Which one?”

 My regular reader will know I’ve been having my issues with comic-books this year. A lot of things have taken the shine off them for me. So it was really fun to find a book that I could simply sit, read, and have a blast with, and that’s exactly what I got with SPARROW AND CROWE: THE DEMONIAC OF LOS ANGELES.

 

You might remember a while back I posted a link to a kickstarter campaign for a comic book. If you don’t remember, just click on this here link and you can then pretend that you did, and I won’t tell anybody. The  project in question was a mini-series, and a prequel of sorts to the long running audio-drama Wormwood, that you can still get totally for free at Itunes. But I only mention the connection so that you’ve got more things to check out; you don;t have to be familiar with the series to pick up the comic.

The story centres around Doctor Xander Crowe, who is an occult detective and also something of a prominent psychologist (just don’t let him ask you about your relationship with your father.) He has a haunted past, and a few evil hand issues, but he’s out and about in L.A. trying to make a living through exorcism. There would be plenty of easy touchstone references to make here, from John Constantine to Harry Dresden, but with Crowe it feels like the creative team are looking a little deeper and tapping into the same sources that inspired those two characters. There’s more Phillip Marlowe in Crow than Constantine. There is something in his characterisation that reminds me specifically of the Marlowe played by Elliot Gould in Altman’s The long Goodbye. In that movie Gould played the character as having each foot in a different world; one in the source material and the 40′s, the other in the amoral seventies. And Crowe here feels like he’s spanning more than one world, floating above the realities of everyday modern life without really managing to commit to them.

The script smartly avoids a lot of the pitfalls that can hamstring new comic writers. Often in a writers early work you’ll see too many words on the page, and an inability to get out of the way of the artist. But the writers, Dave Accampo and Jeremy Rogers have recognised this, and the writing is kept tight and sparse, allowing the scenes to flow. There’s a level of craft here that’s way ahead of where these guys should be, playing with structure enough to fit in a few neat jokes that wouldn’t be possible without a strong understanding of how a comic page works. There are a few rough edges here and there, naturally enough, but to be this far into the learning curve already leaves me no doubt that the storytelling will only get stronger as the series progresses.

The art itself is fresh and fun. I’ve not seen anything from Jared Souza before this project, but again we’re looking at someone with a good eye for storytelling. A comic book artist only has 4-8 pictures per page and they need to choose the right still images to create a moving story in your mind. That might sound like stating the obvious, but it’s surprising how many artists fail this test. Sure, they can cross hatch, and sketch, and shade, they can capture a photo reference in all it’s finer detail, but sometimes they simply can’t tell a story. Souza’s style bears more of a European -almost Tin Tin- looseness, which draws a clear line between itself and the cleaner house styles of bog companies like Marvel and DC. It’s clear and to the point, and it keeps you moving from panel to panel. The finest example of this is the final two pages of the issue, where the scripting, layout and art all combine to perfectly set up and reveal the hook ending. As with the writing, I can’t wait to see where Souza’s art changes as the series progresses.

What’s the book actually about? Well, that would be telling. But you do get demons, mobsters, jokes to make Rockford proud and more than a little blood.

I’m wary of the way people often pitch independent comics. We’re told we should support them because they’re independent. I’d rather ask you to support SPARROW & CROWE: THE DEMONIAC OF LOS ANGELES because it’s good. Go and pick it up.

Except, wait….here’s the catch. The comic comes out in July. It won’t be on the shelves yet.

Then why the hell are you telling us this now, Stringer? 

The comics market works in what they’ve called “the direct market.” Stores order from a catalogue (Diamond) months in a advance, and from these pre-orders the publishers will work out how many copies to print. (Sometimes the larger publishers will also play a bit crafty, and will base their public sales figures on the number of Diamond pre-orders sold to stores, rather than the number of copies the stores will sell. So when you see a spike in sales around Batman comics every time a movie comes out, often what you’re seeing is the spike in educated guesses from retailers rather than customers) But in these harsh times, retailers often pick what they know will sell -costumes and explosions- and skim other parts of the catalogue. So, S&C is in the catalogue right now. The stores will be placing their orders over the next few weeks. If you want to support an interesting comic and good bunch of guys, go into your local store and ask for it. Hell, you can even do their work for them, you can ask them to order item MAY121179 which is in the Hermes Press section.  Job done.

You can sign up to Jay’s mailing list here. Giveaway’s -aka FREE STUFF- start in May.

At The Tone, Leave Your Name And Message

I think studio execs clearly read DSD. Just this week, in that ‘Hollywood’ that they have now, somebody read Dave’s post on Tuesday and said, “hey, shit, they’re talking about PI’s, somebody get me a PI.” Then, after an inevitable comedy mixup involving a seance, Charlie Chaplin, and some pastry, they found they were very short on ideas.

So then they read the comments section, and the exec shouted, “they’re discussing whether the PI genre is stuck in the past. Somebody get me an old one.” And they wheeled out their beta max hooked up to some cathode tubes and decided that Jim Rockford would be their saviour.

Rejoice. Or not.

Here’s a few things I should get off my chest. Firstly, I love PI fiction. I love the idea of it. I love the tradition of it. I love some of the shining lights of it. Many of the finest books I’ve ever read have been ones that would loosely, one way or another, fit into the PI genre. also, I’ve written a book that would, loosely, one way or another, fit into the PI genre. I don’t choose to discuss it in those terms, and the protagonist wouldn’t really feel comfortable hearing it labelled that way, but there’s no mistaking that the PI genre is in OLD GOLD‘s ancestry.

As much as I enjoy the genre, I never really feel the need to get too much into debating it’s relevance or health. I’d rather discuss character, plot, all of that jazz and leave other folks to decide which label to put around the story. I think often times discussing crime in terms like “PI,” “Gangster,” “Mystery,” is to do a disservice to the writers and characters. Which isn’t aimed as a jab at those who do like to return to the topic often, it’s just simply not the aspect of the conversation that really interests me. But in light of Hollywood stealing our ideas, I did think it was worth revisiting a few aspects of the case.

I’m a big fan of Rockford. It’s one of my favourite TV shows of all time. It’s very much of it’s time, and many aspects of it haven’t aged well, but it was written with wit, made with love, and is an important touchstone in the development of the PI. When I’m judging good PI characters, I tend not to compare them to Chandler, Spade, Archer or Spenser. The Mount Rushmore that I let characters stand or fall by is carved of Jim Rockford and Matt Scudder.

But I’m not inclined to take a hatchet to news that Vince Vaughan is to play Rockford in a movie. It doesn’t offend me in any deep way, and my blood doesn’t boil at the thought of someone else playing my man. Let them do it. Let them use an existing property to let some committee of screenwriters get a few paychecks, and let the films inevitable moderate success spawn a new generation of people willing to examine the show with fresh eyes. A common denominator when I tell people of my age or younger how much I love the show is a smirk. Many people find it quaint or funny, because it’s been stuck in afternoon rerun mode for most of our lives, just another show that old people watch at 3pm. If the film comes out and gives the property a degree of hip or cool, even if it’s in some silly “ironic” way, then that’s no bad thing. New fans are new fans.

And as far as the casting goes, I think this is a role that Vince Vaughan could do very well. He doesn’t quite have the easy-going charm of Garner, but he can do chatty underdog and will slip very well into a pair of cheap shows in a sea front trailer. Nathan Fillion is someone who could do Garner quite well, and Jeffrey Dean Morgan could probably bring the beat-up charm.

So if the existence of the film project doesn’t offend me, and the casting feels like a decent choice, then why am I writing about this?

Well, because it frustrates the hell out of me.Especially in light of the (interesting) conversation Dave started on Tuesday. One of the central questions was why are PI’s stuck in the past? Is it the writers or the readers? One of the simplest but most refreshing things about Russel D Mclean’s THE GOOD SON was that he was willing to put a telephone in his PI’s hand. In Britain PI’s are more relevant than ever with the tabloid phone hacking scandal, yet we often seem slow to drag the fictional version up with the times. One of the key elements of Rockford was that he was the PI for the time. The makers examined the tropes and cliches and either updated them, inverted them or disposed of them. They took the idea of the PI and decided what really made him tick and what really was relevant, and in doing that they created one of the greats.

It seems to me that if you want to honour the memory and meaning of The Rockford Files, you do it by not remaking The Rockford Files. Not out of any sense of fanboy angst, but because the whole point of the show was to do something new with the PI. Give us something new, give a writer a chance to craft something lasting. There have been shows that have tried. Terriers had a crack at the modern PI. Angel and The Dresden Files played around with the concept by putting traditional PI tropes into a different genre. I haven’t seen Veronica Mars, but people keep telling me I should, and that it was a fresh and fun PI show. Going back longer than that we had Moonlighting and Remington Steele, which showed the with and freshness of Rockford in different ways (and to varying success) whilst playing around with the PI.

On the big screen, where Rockford is now headed, we’ve had some interesting examinations of the concept. The film Twilight (the Paul Newman one, not the glitter sexy time vampire shite) was very interesting. Gone, Baby, Gone remains one of my favourite films of the past decade for playing around with the PI and applying some stylised realism to the screen.

I just get the feeling that each and every one of these projects, even the ones that maybe lacked in quality, honoured the original spirit of Rockford far more than any Rockford remake can. And that makes me sad. That makes me look back on Dave’s questions from Tuesday and wonder, who is it that’s stuck in the past? Why can’t we ever seem to break free of it?

The Crime Interviews: Volume 2

I get sent a lot of ebooks to read and review. To be honest a lot of the stack up simply because I don;t have a dedicated e-reader yet. Soon I’ll be treating myself to a shiny kindle touch, and then I’ll catch up, but for now everything I read digitally is read on my laptop. And if I’m sat with laptop, then I tend to think I should be writing or researching (or playing Football Manager.) Sometimes a book lands on my inbox that just demands to be read straight away, and when you see one that collects interviews with Ray Banks, Tony Black, William McIlvanney and Helen Fitzgerald, well, I HAVE to check it out.

First let me get out of the way and say what the publisher BLASTED HEATH has to say;

In his foreword, Ian Rankin describes THE CRIME INTERVIEWS: VOLUME TWO as “Fascinating stuff, whether you are a fan of any particular author, or of the genre as a whole, or even of the wider world of Scottish and British Literature in contemporary times. In fact, I may just have to go back and read both volumes again…”

VOLUME ONE brought us page after page of unique insights into how writers think and into the professional secrets of some of the genre’s greatest exponents. With THE CRIME INTERVIEWS: VOLUME TWO, once again Wanner’s encyclopaedic knowledge of Scottish crime fiction is put to expert use in his enthralling and revealing conversations with another inspired line-up of stars of tartan noir. His latest interview subjects include William McIlvanney, Tony Black, Doug Johnstone, Helen FitzGerald, Quintin Jardine, Gordon Ferris, Craig Russell, Douglas Lindsay, Ray Banks and Denise Mina.

I’ve interviewed writers, both in print and on podcasts, and it comes with a huge pressure to try and find good chat. Len Wanner as a talent for good chat. I’m sure there are more intelligent ways to put it, but it boils down to that. He knows how to sit and have good conversations with his subjects, and to get more involved and open responses than the usual oft-rehearsed lines.

There are running themes that run through the collection, such as Scottish identity and the changing mood of the country. McIlvanney’s answers show a man who went from chronicling the lives of the working class, to campaigning for a political party, to now having a more distant and almost philosophical view of the game. Banks on the other hand speaks of letting your subtext do the talking. But this isn’t a political book, nor is it a marketing brochure for Scottish fiction. It’s a book full of good questions and interesting answers, and really comes to life when the authors start talking craft and content. Does Helen Fitzgerald start with character or plot? How does Tony Black manager to write whilst he does all that grappling with symbolism? How does Ray Banks maintain a balance between writing about violence and celebrating it? And why would I give you the answers to all these questions when you can pick up the book and let the authors do it themselves?

Comic Book Origin

Over at DSD today I write a catchy poem* about Batman’s politics. In honour of that post, I decided to dust this one down from the vault, in which I try to break all superhero origins down to a handy 6 point list. There are no others. The list says so**.

1.Revenge

I/we/family have been wronged, I will dedicate my life to getting back. In a silly costume.

(Batman, Punisher, etc)

2.Guilt

I’m to blame for something that happened, I’m an angsty doughball, I will dedicate my life to working through that guilt. In a silly costume.

(Spider-Man)

3.Fate

I’m from another time/place, or a wizard picked me, or I’m half-god (on my mothers side) or an alien ring chose me because I have some hidden quality. I’m going to wear a silly costume.

(Superman, Captain Marvel, Green Lantern, Thor, etc)

4.Curse

I was born with, or given along the way, something that makes me an outcast in normal society. And yet, I’m going to fight for them. In a silly costume. Or leather. Depends.

(Mutants)

5. The Mary Shelly/Ian Malcolm tribute origin for fucked up science.

We’ve opened up Pandora’s box, we’re playing god with powers we shouldn’t harness. And as a parable on how evil and dangerous this is, I’m going to get really cool super powers and fight crime. I might not get a silly costume, but I may get to wear shredded purple pants.

(Hulk, Flash, FF)

6. The Duck origin.

I’m a duck.

(Howard the duck)

It’s interesting to look at how Marvel and DC breaks down this formula. DC seems to have more of 1 and 3, whereas Marvel seems more focused on 2, 4 and 5. Then there’s characters like Daredevil and Spidey who cover more than one. Spidey is given his powers by origin 5, but what makes him Spiderman is the guilt he feels over uncle Ben, origin 2. DD was given his powers by origin 5 (Stan Lee version) or his powers  come from origin 3 but are revealed by origin 5 (Miller version) and his reasons for being DD come from either 1 or 2, depending on Miller or Lee.

The heroes who click with the general public are the ones who stick to one or two of these simple driving origins, Bats, Spidey, Supes, Hulk. The one’s who’ve not quite stuck with the masses or who have needed Robert Downey Jr to make them click, are the ones who’s origins can’t be so easily broken down, such as Iron Man or Hawkeye.

Then there’s the case of Wolverine. His origin was…well…he didn’t have one. He didn’t know who he was, or why, or anything. And there was something compelling about that, but since it was also something of a cheat I didn’t feel it merited a seventh category. But then, they went and started to give him an origin or three, and things got a bit muddled and crap.

It does seem like the Mary Shelly origin has died out, but I’m sure it’ll return next time there’s a big leap forward in another major technology. Or when the oil runs out. the fate origin never seems “cool” to use, but is the one that can always be accepted for explaining super powers because, hey, it’s fate.

What say you?

 

* Note; not actual poem

**The list doesn’t actually say that.

Get Yourself A Song To Sing And Sing It ‘Till You’re Done

In which I pretend to write about Bruce Springsteen but actually write all about myself. It’s one of those.

Being a child of the eighties, a certain era of Bruce Springsteen’s music was hard-wired into me from an early age. It was down in the same part of me that can still sing the theme tune to Mysterious Cities Of Gold. Pop culture was a strange thing back then. It was after home video (but before everyone in my hometown had one) and just after MTV. But it was before the internet, before mobile phones. Culture still happened by a strange form of urban legend on the school playground. This was at a time when children at my junior school had heard of Freddy Krueger but didn’t know it was from a film, and before WWF was fake.

In the school I attended/suffered through at the time, there were two large pieces of graffiti on the wall above the storeroom entrance by which I would play (I still assume it was a store-room, because it clearly wasn’t the boiler room in which Krueger lived.) One said GUNS N ROSES, the other said FUCK SPRINGSTEEN. I’ve never found out where the anger came from, or why someone would feel the need to display it above a door of dubious nature in a working-class junior school in the West Midlands. Still, I guess we would give them marks for getting their message across, because I still remember it over two decades later.

A few years later I recognised him as “that Born In The USA guy” when I first saw the music video to Streets Of Philadelphia. By that point I could hum a few of his hit songs at you, then roll my eyes as I mentioned that song; because popular consensus was that it was all about how great America was and, amongst the great many lazy lies and easy jokes that had seeped into British culture, laughing at America was key.

But I was set up to like Bruce in ways I didn’t know at the time. When many young children are being taught The Wheels On The Bus as a nice sing along ditty, my Mum was teaching me the words to Joe Hill. That said, the first single I ever bought was the vinyl 45 of Batdance by Prince, I can probably still sing Bat Out Of Hell word for word, and I own more than one DEACON BLUE album, so please don’t think I’m up here looking to be cool.

Where am I going with this? To 1995, that’s where.

1995, and there’s a television advert for Springsteen’s GREATEST HITS album. It was one of those ads that had a static picture of the album cover,  whilst clips from the most famous tracks played. I knew many of them and, crucially, they sounded a world removed from what was in the charts at the time. It also looked pretty cool, the leather jacket, the (not a ) Telecaster slung across his back, I never stood a chance. I’ve always remembered it as Christmas, but Wikipedia suggests maybe it was my birthday; either way I asked my family for the album (I still wasn’t committed to the idea enough to go and buy that Born In The USA guy’s album myself.) And, family being family, they also got it slightly wrong; what I found when I opened the present was a copy of….yes….Born In The USA. Hits wise, there was very little difference, really. (And, again, to sabotage any idea of me being the cool kid, the album I played more than any other that year was most likely the soundtrack CD to BATMAN FOREVER.)

I skipped around with it, because it was a CD and I was still in love with the idea of skipping around at the press of a button, I ignored the title track for a few months, and I started to seep the songs into the mix-tapes I was making for people. Then I started listening to the words, and that was that.

It wasn’t too long before I owned a leather jacket, a (squire) Telecaster, and was scribbling lyrics myself. Downbound Train was the first sing I learned to play, even if it was in the lazy half-arsed power chords that I would never grow out of using. There were other influences of course, lets’ just agree to ignore them for now. Springsteen was to be my road to Dylan, old-school rock and roll, and country music. BORN TO RUN was my ticket to another world and NEBRASKA was my invite back to the kind of socially-conscious acoustic music that people had raised me on.

Friends couldn’t look past his image problem, or the fact that his music sounded “so American.” And it also seemed strange to people that I could like songs that referenced things so alien to us; we didn’t tear up the highways at night, there were no turnpikes, we had canals rather than rivers, and we certainly didn’t venture to them on Saturday nights. But I never saw the songs as foreign; across from that junior school I mentioned were abandoned factories that had built tanks during the second world war. The metal ghosts of coalmine equipment still scattered the landscape, and most of the local towns were still teetering on the edge following the closure of FH LLoyds (to be replaced by IKEA, yay!) The songs spoke to me in a far more direct and passionate way than any of the smug-faced class tourism of Blur or the macho posturing of Oasis. “Cool Britannia” was fun marketing, but It bore no relation to where I was. Whereas songs about hometowns, about racial tensions, economic depression, unemployment, and one-too-many women named Mary- these all seemed real.

When I tried college, a strange move after being such a poor school student,  I found that the most important issue was whether you liked NIRVANA or GREEN DAY (you were not allowed to like both, which I kinda did,)  and whether you hated THE OFFSPRING for ‘selling out,’ (I was a teenager, I was allowed to be wrong on that burning issue.) It was also important what kind of person you were, and at Dudley college in the late 90′s this was played out along very simple lines; were you a Grebo, a Goth, a Rocker or a Trendy. I didn’t really want to dress like any of those groups, but I could talk music with each of them, and that was all well and good as long as I left Springtseen out of it.

Later on as I tried being in bands, and being in and around the music scene in Birmingham and the Black Country of the late 90′s and early 00′s, I found that all of the cliques were united on this one thing. I would get a nodding-if-vaguely-unaware appreciation when I mentioned that one of my main influences were The Replacements but just a sneer if I mentioned the other was an American named Bruce. You quickly learn to either hide your unpopular influences, or quit having the conversation. I went for the latter. And everyone in that scene was better at music than me anyway, because already I was obsessing too much about the words.

I was a bit of a dick about him getting “popular” again in the middle of the last decade. What I should have been doing at the time, was blogging about how great it was that he was getting new recognition and that so many talented musicians were citing him as an influence. What I did was try and turn my ‘not being cool’ into a passive-aggressive crusade for the ultimate cool.  But hey, live and learn. Moving across country and getting more involved online finally put me in touch with people who were more open to talking about his music.

He’s one of the great restless spirits of modern music. I’ve always loved the fearlessness with which he would change gears, the way that each album would be a departure from the last. It’s no accident that the two albums I have least time for -Human Touch and Working On A Dream- have been when he’s released albums that were mining safe ground.

As I got into the bootlegs, and then the official TRACKS release, I learned lessons in writing. I found that these tight and controlled lyrics that I loved would often have been honed over a number of years and across different songs, moving pieces around until he found the right form. so much of writing is about getting past the idea that genius simply happens and into getting down and dirty, and moving those pieces around. It also showed a willingness to leave good shit on the shelf. Don’t just put out everything that you’ve written, and don’t just throw things together into a collection for the sake of a release; wait on it, work on it, make sure you can stand by the work that’s released.

I also came to love the honesty of his songwriting. There’s nothing quite like going through a marriage break-up and a divorce to make you realise what an honest album TUNNEL OF LOVE is. Or how impressed I was on the reunion tour when he not only played American Skin in MSG, but wasn’t afraid to tell the crowd to shut up so that he could do it. Because, again, so much of writing lies in learning lessons of honesty and integrity. Story first. Emotion first. Honesty first. And THE GHOST OF TOM JOAD came with a research and reading list. Shit, it wasn’t a free ride, there was homework. It was social fiction set to music.

I spent a long time trying to be my influences. Even now, if i’m watching a gig I can spot if someone else has stolen a move from Springsteen, or Strummer, or any of the guys I tried stealing things from. I thought that liking Springsteen and Westerberg  meant I had to get up in front of people and try to be them. I thought that liking films meant I had to make them. That learning to read with comics meant that I needed to produce them.  I failed at each and every attempt to be those people. There comes a time when the best way to serve your influences is to put them to one side. What I found was that I liked writing. Rather than the spontaneity of performance that other people can use so well, I liked to obsess. I wanted to sit with a blank page and move the words around until they were my words, then move them around some more until they were the right words.

I still have my much travelled and much modified esquire guitar, that bears more than a passing resemblance to a certain other guitar, but it sits next to my desk and almost never gets played. Find your thing and follow it. Find your voice and fight for it. “Get yourself a song to sing, and sing it ’till you’re done.”

Everybody has got one. Find yours.

And while you’re at it, listen to Bruce’s new album, “Wrecking Ball.”