Souvenir

by Michael Bracewell

A vivid eulogy for London of the late 1970s and early 80s – the last years prior to the rise of the digital city. An elliptical, wildly atmospheric remembrance of the sites and soundtrack, at once aggressively modern and strangely elegiac, that accompanied the twilight of one era and the dawn of another. Haunted bedsits, post-punk entrepreneurs in the Soho Brasserie, occultists in Fitzrovia, Docklands before Canary Wharf, frozen suburbs in the winter of 1980...

Genres: Music, Fiction, Essays, 20th Century, British Literature

124 pages, Hardcover

Published September 1, 2021

Reviews

[Alwynne · Rating 4 out of 5]

Novelist, music journalist and art critic Michael Bracewell’s idiosyncratic memoir, or perhaps memorial, of London in the 1970s and 80s is part essay, part prose poem. A London of stark contrasts, of hushed audiences gathering for readings of Bataille in down-at-heel theatres, exhibitions in crumbling squats, dinner parties where William Burroughs holds forth to reverent spectators, boys in raincoats wander through the rain, girls linger in art gallery bars, Derek Jarman and Kathy Acker reign. Bracewell mixes stretches of hypnotic, impressionistic sketches of cityscapes punctuated by railway lines and grimy underground stations with his soundtrack of the times from Soft Cell to Suburban Lawns. It’s an evocative, immersive piece, a fascinating portrait of an era and a place, despite its emphasis on white-boy-would-be-avant-garde culture - no trace here of Sylvester, disco, hip-hop or reggae parties in Brixton squats. A pre-digital world of dreams and imaginings that will fast give way to a Thatcherite austerity, just beyond the page a world to come of pre-digested pop, Loadsamoney sans irony, city suits, and weekends snorting cocaine.


Rating: 3.5

[Nigeyb · Rating 3 out of 5]

I am squarely in the target market for Michael Bracewell's Souvenir: an extended essay (aka a very short book) which recalls and ruminates upon the pre-digital London of the 1970s and 1980s. I was a young person living, working and socialising in that very London, and retain vivid memories of the era.

Some of the impressionist narrative resonated, much felt wilfully obscure and my mind wandered.

Sections about the Virgin Megastore, Tottenham Court Road station, and the ICA are wonderful, but other sections left me baffled.

The slippery, time shifting narrative of recalled moments, places and encounters is all over the shop. Both a strength and a weakness, but more of a weakness. It's all so wilfully selective.

I'd love to read a more mainstream version of this book because when it's good it's great.

3/5

[Alex Sarll]

Imagine you were set on writing the definitive novel of early eighties London, its War And Peace or Les Miserables, and you began by writing the passages of scene-setting which would top and tail each of its major sections. And then you realised that, because you're Michael fucking Bracewell, those sections had done everything you needed, preserved that moment for as long as there were readers, so you could skip all the bits with plot and lead characters and whatever who would only really have been there as a support system anyway, and were now superfluous. That's what Souvenir is. It probably helps that I really enjoy prose poems and sourcebooks, given this is both; it certainly does no harm, except to my sense of self, that the London in which I first arrived was closer, both in time and spirit, to this tatty yet oh so alive metropolis than to whatever the fuck the 21st century has ground it into. Heady, gorgeous, remarkable stuff, magical even as it reminds us that British glamour has always come with a faint note of bathos. Interviewed about the book last night, Bracewell was insistent when it came to abjuring nostalgia, but I think that's a bit like the way the people who'll most firmly say there's no such thing as the Mafia are Italian-American men with unclear business interests.

[Laura · Rating 3 out of 5]

Zinc-coloured skies, the air smelling of vinegar and lost illusions, a dead gull, the sense that always, somewhere, is elsewhere, somewhere beyond the wires, perhaps, where a retrograde alterity sulks behind a burger bar and there's a sense of transmission and hopeless longing. There's a lot of pages like this in 'Souvenir', a would-be poetic and richly melancholic wander through the London of the late 1970s and early 1980s, the last days before, in Bracewell's view, new technology and dance drugs spoiled popular music and dethroned it from the exalted cultural status it had enjoyed for the previous twenty years. It's a nostalgic and profoundly sad document, desperately pretentious (as so much new romantic posturing was) and yet disconcertingly sincere. I seem to have caught Bracewell's adverb disease. The syntax of the prose is like sagging elastic, but it is filled with visionary moments nonetheless. A curious little book, the sort of thing I used to read on trains to make myself look more 'deep'.

[Stagger Lee · Rating 3 out of 5]

Sometimes brilliant, sometimes baffling. Paul Morley doing Iain Sinclair, long lists of signifiers and present tense descriptions, like flicking through Polaroids. Some of the references were so precise I trusted the ones I didn't get but like The Waste Land (which crops up a lot), you'd surely only really get this if you understand everything Bracewell is referring to? Still, some excellent sentences and images .

[Scott Cumming · Rating 3 out of 5]

It's at time wondrous and at others near impenetrable. It is a one of a kind kaleidoscopic work riffing on the late 70s and early 80s London where the Pop Age is running out of steam and thrusting forward interesting new concepts based on the intellectualism of the past and transgressing the pop of the 50s and 60s and the Digital Age looms on the horizon.

This is a work of vignettes as prose poems describing scenes from a life in detail with the adjectives coming thick and fast. At times, it creates wonderful imagery and at others it blurs into a din with only a few details coming to life.

Bracewell references The Waste Land and it's case of being celebrated while not being wholly understood and that might be my position with this one. It is brimming with electricity and written with passion, but Bracewell himself might be the only person who understands the entirety of the text.

A fabulous, if somewhat baffling, curio of the time when pop seemed to be a transgressive tool to bash Tories with before delving into the workaday office stylings of dress and milquetoast middle class melange.

[Owen Hatherley · Rating 5 out of 5]

By far the best thing I've read of MB's: a series of extremely condensed, glinting, elliptical portraits of post-punk London, surely the book he's spent his life running up to. Also, so short you can read the whole thing in one bath.

[Bookthesp1 · Rating 4 out of 5]

Michael Bracewells best book is England is Mine- a wonderful cultural journey into pop life and English culture-a cornucopia of all things Albion. It's one of the best pop culture things I've ever read- referencing a wide array of cultural icons from Wilde onwards. Souvenir is a micro cosmic work of similar ilk though the referencing is deliberately vague and the narrative is more of a tone poem summing up London at a crux point of change in the early 80s as it navigated post 70s; post punk; post industrial; post modernism; post polaroid- a love letter to a bygone age with a futurist tinge in the style of all sorts of people from Iain Sinclair (another Londonist) to many other "nostalgics". Bracewells masturbatory prose journeys through key parts of London that undergo change with a pop soundtrack to underpin and herald out loud the new future that's emerging. Occasionally he teases describing but not naming the band or pop persona; arch and arsey with two fingers to the reader who doesn't immediately get the reference.
Reading it is like reading a fever dream as if someone had googled thesaurus /wiki references to 80s London and printed them out scribbling a few linking sentences- a photographic journey with no photos and an evocation that holds something back- elegy and elegiac for its own sake because that's how Bracewell wants it.
All perfectly post modern/meta and crashing through "the past is a foreign country" narratives (this was written in 2021) as though the early 80s is now some old Polaroid photo (turned sepia perhaps?) to be waved around and dried to the lascivious sound of Soft Cell or much more obscure bands gleefully reeled off in a knowing teasing tone. Bracewell is obsessed with the quality of light and there are a cornucopia of kaleidoscopic examples of the light on different buildings/settings/streets as though he has swallowed a magic lantern or more likely played with the portrait mode on his I- phone with furious "imaginings".....the 80s was lived under another sky and perhaps another sun......
Souvenir indeed and this is worth re reading referencing Pound, Eliot, (obviously) Larkin, Wyndham Lewis; Laurie Anderson; Grace Jones; Prefab Sprout and of course Forster.(EM, not Robert) It's up to the reader to -"only connect".........

[J M-B · Rating 3 out of 5]

Souvenirs are marginal things, at best. Something bought, or occasionally stolen, to serve as a keepsake, memorialising a place or a moment forever, only to be found in a drawer years later severed from significance, meaning and even memory. There is a great deal of name-checking in these pages and there needs to be because, unless you are Michael Bracewell himself, not all names will be known or recalled and the attempted evocation of a lost time and mood will misfire. The Final Academy? Su Tissue? Stevø? Culturally significant for a fading generation but I am not so sure that the writing will convey very much when the lists (the souvenirs) have to be cross-checked on google or youtube. There is a lot of weather in this little book as well, a surprising amount of weather.

[S.P. Moss · Rating 4 out of 5]

Reading “Souvenir” is rather like the experience of seeing a photo you weren’t aware had been taken, forty years after the event. The memory of place, sensations and state of mind filters back in dreamlike snatches. This is a book heavy on atmosphere, painting a picture in words of 1980s gloomy afternoons and rainy London nights.

It’s all typically British, and focussed on London, in the last decade before youth culture became global and the internet took over the world. Some of the essays were a little bit up their own whatsit for me (but in a rather glorious way) while others gleefully rescued all sorts of forgotten tat from the depths of my memory and polished it up to shine once more.

[Russell Barton · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not so much a book as a collection of evocative descriptions of times, places and people in London in the early 80s. If you remember the era and the area you’ll find it vividly brought back to life, although at some points it just feels like he’s trying to as many adjectives as he can into a sentence. He also has a tendency for repetition (stale smoke is mentioned numerous times). Weirdly, I learnt some facts about Prefab Sprout that I didn’t know - I say weirdly as they’re not from London and I wouldn’t have associated them with it myself.
An interesting read then, but more of a diversion than a full journey.

[Katy Wheatley · Rating 5 out of 5]

A series of vignettes of life in London during the Eighties underpinned by descriptions of the fashions and music of the day. This is so gorgeous and so well written. It reminded me a little of Absolute Beginners by Colin McInnes. It has the poignant feel of a time and a place loved and now gone by, of youth and freedom and people taking themselves so seriously while simultaneously having so much fun.

[Reader · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a book about the psycho-geography of my own UK generation-X cohort - and hence about the cultural consciousness that formed me. And it was exactly as I had hoped, a dream-like atmosphere popping with recognition. All of which means, for me, that this book worked exactly as it should, as a souvenir of far remembered place. For others, who knows? But I liked it.

[Andy Mackenzie · Rating 4 out of 5]

I can't pretend I understood all of it, but there were sections where I was instantly transported back to a grubby more interesting city, feeling a mild sense of disappointment on putting down the book and finding my self in its less accessible 21st century version.

[Rowena Macdonald · Rating 5 out of 5]

Loved this. Very evocative of London in the early 80s. I wasn't actually there, as I was only a young kid back then, but, still, the writing took me there. A slim volume. More like a prose poem in places. Had a sort of English misty melancholy which I really enjoyed.

[Assiyakrs · Rating 2 out of 5]

2.5 stars

I think this could potentially be a good book but you need to have experienced London during the 1970s and 80s to understand what is being spoken about. The sentences are all very long and trail on so it is hard to follow a lot of the time.

[Lizzie Evans · Rating 2 out of 5]

I really, really wanted to love this but found the endless lists of descriptors hard to keep up with and the "you had to be there" references a bit jarring. Shame really.

[Paul Narvaez · Rating 4 out of 5]

This short book was read at a brisk pace, attempting to match the stream-of-conscience flow of impressionistic words and descriptions. It's dense with quotes and the sensibility of a poet.

[Dean Brannagan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Amazingly evocative of that hypa-charged period between 1979 and 1981. The music scene having been kicked up the arse by punk, set off an explosion of creative ideas that still reverberates to this very day. Blimey, I should write for the Guardian!

[Don Fisk · Rating 4 out of 5]

A very vivid evocation of the London music scene in the 1970s and 80s - Marc Almond, Soft Cell and all that. A lot of very "Rabelaisian" lists of adjectives to describe garb and costuming, attitudes, styles, and abrasiveness between style kings and queens - a bloggish kind of prose style, but very very vivid.

The feel or ambience that architectural aspects give to the scene is evinced - eg the Eduardo Paolozzi mosaics in Tottenham Court Road tube station.

All of this gives a dark black and white Carol Reed "Third Man" feel to the scene, and it is a pleasure to read.

[Dante Fowler · Rating 2 out of 5]

Disappointing.

[Menno Pot · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is beautiful prose. Souvenir is a bit of a 'guided tour', in a way, with Bracewell showing us around London in the 1980s. The city, the music, the art, the 'feel' of the city in the post-punk era. I could see, hear and smell the place. Souvenir brought back memories of 1980s London that I never had.