Looking back at…The Beatles

I’m proud to have illustrated looking back at…The Beatles (Cognitive Books), which tells the Beatles story from their early days ripping it up in the Cavern and Hamburg, through to the breakup, just seven world-changing years later.

With its rhyming text by Matt Singleton, the book has been carefully developed in close collaboration with the Alzheimer’s Society, so that it can be enjoyed by people living with dementia or other cognitive difficulties, many of whom struggle to read and may have given up followed a diagnosis. You can read more about the project at Cognitive Books’ site.

I’m pleased that this week the book is now out in the world complete with an audio version narrated by the terrific Bill Nighy, and that I can share some of this work with you. Here are four of the final illustrations.

Although I’ve been commissioned to draw the Beatles in a few different ways in recent years, this was a rare chance to dive deep into a subject I know and love, exploring the whole story. As you can see, I had fun picking up on all the references in the text and adding plenty of extra details for fellow fans to spot. Watching my Anthology DVDs so many times paid off here! 

I thought I’d share are a couple of the early roughs, seeing as you’ve read this far – a few things got shuffled around, cut or added as the book took shape.

I’m delighted that the book’s had a really positive launch this week, with coverage on The World at One and BBC Breakfast among other things. It’s great that it will be helping people with dementia rediscover the joy of reading, and even connecting them to their memories of this most beloved of bands. As well as from the usual bookshops, the book can be ordered from the Alzheimer’s Society, helping to support the work they do to give help and hope to people suffering from this dreadful condition.

Albums of 2023

As usual, here’s some of the new music that’s been in heavy rotation here this year.

Shana Cleveland – Manzanita
Margo Cilker – Valley Of Heart’s Delight
Shirley Collins – Archangel Hill
Spencer Cullum’s Coin Collection – Spencer Cullum’s Coin Collection 2
Jason Isbell and the 400 Unit – Weathervanes
Michael Nau – Accompany
Nico Paulo – Nico Paulo
Quasi – Breaking the Balls of History
Setting – Shone A Rainbow Light On
Sparklehorse – Bird Machine
Kassi Valazza – Kassi Valazza Knows Nothing
Yo La Tengo – This Stupid World

And my favourite reissue has to be Jason Isbell’s Southeastern 10 Year Anniversary Edition. This 2013 instant classic was remastered and bundled with a full complement of early demos, plus a recent live recording of the album played in full at the Bijou Theate in Knoxville. I think the performance currently available on YouTube is from a different night at the same venue, but it’s equally thrilling. Jason’s remarks between songs at those gigs remind us how so many of the lyrics were brave challenges to himself to stay sober – stuff that would become painfully embarrassing to sing if he had somehow relapsed into the chaos that had characterised his life before. 10 years of Southeastern means 10 years of sobriety, and with it unprecedented success and particularly great songwriting – of which this year’s new album Weathervanes is a perfect example.

Scarlet Town

Scarlet Town by Leonora Nattrass

Laurence Jago, muddling through his young life on the edges of government and high society in Georgian England, is now the unassuming hero of three gripping historical novels by Leonora Nattrass, with more to come I hope.

Jago can’t help but stumble upon corruption and skulduggery wherever his work takes him, and whatever his changing fortunes. He began Black Drop as a Whitehall clerk wrestling with a laudanum habit when he was implicated in a spy plot and the shocking murder of a colleague. In Blue Water, having swerved the gallows but left the Foreign Office under a cloud, he was tasked with guarding a momentous treaty on a voyage from Falmouth to Philadelphia. Over the course of these adventures, he became firm friends with the garrulous journalist William Philpott.

As this third title, Scarlet Town, begins, Jago and Philpott have returned to England (an adventure in itself, involving by the sounds of it) and travelled to Helston, Cornwall, where Philpott intends to report on an imminent parliamentary election. For Jago, more or less Philpott’s apprentice at this point, it’s also a return to his Cornish roots.

On the Friday afternoon they arrive, there’s a volatile atmosphere, with much jostling and heckling in the streets and bets being placed in the pub. Very quickly, a dead body is discovered, and it’s one of the two elderly electors due to vote in that weekend’s election. Yes, only two men in the whole borough are eligible to vote in the shambolic quasi-democratic setup of 1796, and they’re firmly in the pocket of Helston’s longstanding benefactor Duke of Leeds. In the background, the mayor is sponsoring an alternative candidate, who happens to be the chair of the East India Company.

Of course, it’s not long before Jago finds himself investigating the murder, and he’s dragged into the best, most intricate plot Nattrass has devised so far. We get to know the streets and people of this bustling market town, brought to life just as vividly as London’s damp garrets and the cramped cabins of the mail ship Tankerville in the mid-Atlantic were in the previous books.

Two favourite characters of mine were the cantankerous sexton Jeb Nettle, and the mayor’s niece Sarah Glynn, who dotes on her pregnant pug Claudia and diverts every conversation into an appreciation of the Gothic novel, which was very much in vogue at the time. (Jago and Philpott are stunned to discover that wigs have gone out of fashion whilst they were in America, another precise historical detail that Nattrass seems to have enjoyed introducing here.)

Then there’s Jago’s affable cousin Pythagoras (‘Piggy’ for short), who has recently stepped in as Helston’s surgeon and physician and finds he has his work cut out – grisly autopsies on top of the depressing rounds to tend to sickly children. At one point we glimpse Piggy’s frustration at the miserably imprecise nature of ‘physic’, and how his work can seem so futile in a world rife with lethal disease (smallpox, diphtheria, typhus) and infant death. ;Who knows whether any of our remedies work, and if so, which ones?’ he despairs, before outlining the dire situation as it was in the 1790s, when ‘every textbook has its own pet theories and contradicts all the others’. It’s a disarming moment, typical of the depth of character and historical colour that I enjoy in these books.

As with the previous titles, Nattrass ends with a welcome author’s note explaining which events and people are lifted from history. Her talent for dropping compelling, rounded characters of her own into genuine historical events, and laying before them a pacy, engrossing mystery, seems only to get stronger.

Utterly Dark and the Tides of Time

Utterly Dark and the Tides of Time by Philip Reeve

Mysteriously washed ashore on Wildsea as a young child, Utterly has grown up under the guardianship of the Watchers – those who live at Sundown Watch, where they observe the seas to the west, and fastidiously note down anything out of the ordinary. Much fear, folklore and superstition is attached to the great oceanic power said to lurk out there, the Gorm. That’s all despite this being very much the enlightened, empirical Regency era – but the Autumn Isles are a long way from London, and Wildsea is the most western and forgotten of these.

In the first novel in this fantastic series, Face of The Deep, Utterly learned a lot about her own mystical connection to the sea. Its sequel Heart of the Wild involved a trip to another of the Autumn Isles, where Utterly had to contend with earth magic and a treacherous vicar. This third story is largely a return to sea magic, but a bold time-slip twist allows us to see Wildsea in 1971, and there’s an even more compelling villain.

Much fantasy fiction seems keen to establish how its magic works. In the Utterly books it’s an elusive, intangible thing, defying not just explanation and logic but even memory for the characters who do encounter it. The tumultuous events of the first two books, including encounters with the brilliantly creepy Men o’ Weed (zombielike servants of the Gorm made up of floppy strands of seaweed) and a scramble through a vast primeval underworld, are hard to bring to mind in the cold light of day.

Magic was tricksy like that: more vivid than real life when it was happening to you, but harder to keep hold of than a snowflake or a soap bubble.

Reeve’s skilful writing is likely to make you feel that befuddled awe for yourself, with virtuosic passages evoking immense supernatural forces that leave you wondering ‘How did he do that?‘, when you turn the page and he’s once again describing something more tangible, like kippers for breakfast. A great example is how an early chapter ‘Into The Sea of Time’ captures the mind-boggling variety of the planet’s oceans, reasserts the dreadful cruelty and power of the Gorm, and expands and compresses centuries, all in the space of five pages.

While Utterly traverses the ocean and time itself, the other established characters all have their own adventures, prompted by the sudden arrival of the HMS Acantha on Wildsea. Will Dark’s involves an old pal from his days carousing in London, Constantine (who made an entertaining but brief appearance in Face of the Deep) and a haphazard maritime adventure into the Western Deeps. Meanwhile, his pregnant wife Aish detects a troubling, chillingly powerful new presence on Wildsea.

The characters who end up in 1971 experience it very differently, and it’s great fun reading about their initial impressions of motor cars, T-shirts, indoor toilets and Penguin bars, amongst other things. Reeve even finds time for a couple of sly Doctor Who jokes before we end up back in the 1800s.

I’ve enjoyed and admired these three books enormously. Even if Utterly’s own story is now complete, I gather from Reeve (when I briefly spoke with him at a Q&A earlier this year) that he hopes to tell more stories from the Autumn Isles.

Meanwhile, my son and I are enjoying another fantastic series from Reeve, this one for younger readers and produced with regular collaborator Sarah McIntyre – Adventuremice!

Where The World Ends

Where The World Ends by Geraldine McCaughrean

Where The World Ends is largely set on a remote sea stac in the Outer Hebrides in the 18th century. A group of St Kilda boys, supervised by three men, take the short voyage from Hirta to Stac an Armin (‘Stack of the Warrior’) and begin the regular summer visit to to harvest the numerous birds there. Only this time, no boat turns up to collect them a few weeks later. Why on earth would that be?

McCaughrean has based the story on true events of 1727, but come up with her own cast of boys and men, filling in the many gaps in the history beautifully. For most of the novel, we see this remote corner of the world through the eyes of Quilliam, one of the older lads. Quill is already adept at gannet-killing, and when he’s not busy fowling, he’s pining after Murdina, a young mainland woman he knew back on Hirta, and wrestling with those new feelings.

As the nigh-impossible Atlantic winter sets in, and still no-one comes to their rescue, it’s fascinating to see how each of the fowlers comes to terms with being marooned. It’s a hellish scenario, but they’re able to scavenge many moments of joy and hope from the shortening days, even while they’re so busy surviving. Quill himself appoints the other boys duties according to their particular skills – the tuneful Calum is ‘Keeper of Music’, and Niall is ‘Keeper of Memories’, such happy glimpses of home being precious currency on the lonely stac. The overbearing Kenneth is even included as ‘Keeper of Days’, trusted to keep count of the time they’ve spent in grim exile – so near to home, yet so very far.

Religion underpins the fledgling civilisation on Stac an Admin, as the group tries to hold onto and observe its faith, even though it seems like the world beyond must have come to an end. The boys begin to note omens to that effect, everywhere they look. There are flashes of horror, and of course major divides appear within the group, but the drama is always grounded in the very convincing characters, and builds towards a satisfying but nuanced ending.

Aimed at teenagers, but a compelling, thoughtful piece of historical fiction for any reader, Where The World Ends deservedly won McCaughrean the Carnegie Medal for a second time.

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Usborne Quicklinks
McCaughrean’s publisher Usborne offers up an excellent bunch of interesting links related to the book, including a letter from the author about what attracted her to the story, bits of history from the St Kilda archipelago, and videos of the gannets, guillemots fulmars and storm petrels encountered by the characters.

Bottled Goods

Bottled Goods by Sophie Van Llewyn

Alina and Liviu, a young married couple in 70s Communist Romania, are suddenly under suspicion when Liviu’s brother takes a trip to the West and doesn’t return. Are they defectors too? After a blunder at Alina’s work implicates her further, they fall under the harsh glare of the Secret Police and new strictures upon their lives become hard to bear. Their marriage starts to crumble.

What next? Enter Aunt Theresa, an unforgettable character. Married to Party nobility, she’s a woman of peculiar privilege (she drives a sleek black Volga and gold bracelets jangle on her wrist), yet she holds onto many of the folk customs and beliefs of the country. Could these old ways somehow help Alina out of her impossible situation? When Alina is at last forced to explore this, circumstances take a startling, sharp turn – one that’s signposted in the very first flash but still upends the narrative brilliantly.

This is a novel in flash, so theoretically any one of the very short chapters could be read and enjoyed in isolation – indeed, several of the pieces that make up Bottled Goods have previously won awards in their own right. But taken as a whole here, they offer a fascinating range of angles on a relatively simple, powerful plot. Alina’s voice is reflected differently in the different flashes, some of which span weeks or months, some of which chronicle a few fraught hours. Sometimes the plot is refracted through inventive formats like a pleading list to Father Frost, a table budgeting for the purchase of a used Dacia, and a sequence of postcards from the West. So much is left open to the imagination in the gaps between these pieces, but that makes Alina’s journey all the more compelling.

Montgomery Bonbon: Murder at the Museum

Montgomery Bonbon: Murder at the Museum by Alasdair Beckett-King – Illustrated by Claire Powell

Alasdair Beckett-King’s star has risen in recent years with a run of viral videos in which he’s spoofed Scandi noir, spooky podcasts, annoying companions in RPGs, old-school cartoons, and much else besides. His stand-up is going from strength to strength, and his podcast Loremen now runs to hundreds of hilarious episodes picking apart the weirdest of local legends. I first encountered him via AdventureX, the excellent narrative adventure games convention he has helped to organise over the past decade or so.

This very busy, very funny man has now found the time to write a middle-grade comedy murder mystery, teeing up a series centred on the great detective Montgomery Bonbon. Bonbon is really ten-year-old girl Bonnie Montgomery, wearing an old raincoat and a fake moustache – and pontificating in a wildly inconsistent foreign accent. Only Bonbon’s loyal sidekick Grampa Banks is aware of the little girl behind this cunning disguise.

Bonnie and Banks are established as an already seasoned crime-fighting duo, with their catalogue of previous successes, putting away the likes of the Emmental Bandit and Tortellini the Magnificent, merely hinted at in the opening chapters. This fresh investigation involves the disappearance of a prized sculpture, the Widdlington Eagle, and the simultaneous death of a security guard. That all takes place in a locked room in the turret of an eccentrically-curated local museum, which Bonnie and Banks happen to be visiting at the time. As soon as Bonnie senses that something is very much afoot, she transforms into Bonbon and launches an investigation, much to the chagrin of the police’s Inspector Sands.

One of the joys of this story is how Bonbon baffles, frustrates and somehow impresses the grown-ups in his orbit. The tortured turns of phrase, of course gleaned from the argot of Poirot, are deployed brilliantly – from ‘Everybody to stay precisely where you are being!’ to ‘Please do not discompose yourself, mein ami‘. Running through everything there’s an affection for, and deference to, the hallmarks of the crime genre. Bonbon dutifully goes through the ‘doldrums’ phase common to every great case (with a fun tangent into whether Watson would have ever called Holmes a ‘right sulky-pops’) and there’s a passage on the difficulty of spelling, pronouncing and executing a classic denouement.

The search for the Widdlington Eagle becomes an enjoyably twisty crime caper, with its entertaining range of suspects and its neatly laid clues, all building towards that satisfying reveal. It’s illustrated throughout by Claire Powell, whose drawings set the scene and throw in a few extra visual jokes. Every page of this first Bonbon book sparkles with Alasdair’s particular wit – even the acknowledgments and dedication are spoofs of a sort. It’s easy to see this developing into a very popular series.

Faith, Hope and Carnage

Faith, Hope and Carnage by Nick Cave & Seán O’Hagan

In this series of conversations with Seán O’Hagan, Nick Cave examines his creative life in years since the death of his teenage son, Arthur, in the summer of 2015. His music since that shattering event has navigated the condition of grief in various ways, and his personal faith has deepened.

Cave has always been prepared to explain his creative methods (the 20,000 Days On Earth film is just one example of that). Lately he has sought to do the same with his grieving process, and his whole system of belief, via his Red Hand Files website, the Conversations tours, and now this book of interviews. He is typically articulate even when he revisits of the early, roaring stages of grief, and of how he has come to understand love and loss are beautifully, terribly intertwined. It is of course all right there in his music (listen to the tale of Kisa at the end of Hollywood), but talking to O’Hagan he matter-of-factly reminds us how ‘this will happen to everybody at some point – a deconstruction of the known self’.

Cave’s never been a complacent artist, rarely retreading the same ground, but he believes the version of him that did survive, did not become a ‘small, hard thing that has contracted around an absence’, is more fearless than ever before.

“I’ve become quite accustomed now to that queasy feeling of stepping into the unknown. I think I’ve learned to trust that sense of discomfort as a signifier that something important may be afoot, that change is happening.”

I feel like I detected ‘feeling of creative terror, a vertiginous feeling’ behind the music when I first heard Ghosteen. It also hovered over the first gig of the Carnage tour, a nervy post-lockdown watershed for artist and audience (“Like, I didn’t know what to do with my hands!” Cave recalls here). He puts his newfound ‘defiance’ in such moments to how he is buoyed, encouraged and emboldened in everything he does by Arthur – not just the memory of him, but ‘an optimistic force, a hopeful force’. He accepts that this, and other things he has experienced, may be something only other grievers can understand.

One of the 17 ceramic figures in Nick Cave’s series The Devil – A Life

The Nick Cave of before is acknowledged – he offers glimpses of his ‘uncomplicated, free-range childhood’ in Wangaratta, tales from junkie days pinging between London and various rehab hubs, and as detailed an account of Blixa Bargeld’s departure from the Bad Seeds as we’ll ever get (a frustrating studio session that ends with the classic kiss-off “I didn’t get into rock ‘n’ roll to play rock ‘n’ roll!”). However, Cave has little time for nostalgia, or indeed biography, and seems mildly puzzled that someone thought Mark Mordue’s Boy On Fire: The Young Nick Cave was worth publishing (for what it’s worth, I thought it was marvellous). So whenever Cave feels O’Hagan has tricked him into looking back too much, he snaps out of it and enthuses about some current project, like the Staffordshire figures (themed around the life of the devil) he started making once lockdown forced him to cancel a world tour.

It’s that friendly tussle between interview and interviewee that makes this such a rewarding, generous book. For his part O’Hagan tries to pin Cave down on matters of faith, whenever he tends towards fuzzy truisms that might just about fly on The Red Hand Files. O’Hagan is also a perceptive, useful sounding board – speaking to Cave several times during a writing and recording streak, he’s able to trace the subtle influence of Jimmy Webb’s grandiose ballads on the songs of Carnage, and a throwaway remark from O’Hagan is even immortalised as a lyric in Lavender Fields. Along the way we are warned of ‘residual idea’, a comfortable song that comes out easily, but really ought to be cleared away ‘like muck in the pipes’ to make way for something really exciting.

Almost every page has some illuminating, memorable observation, or at least an entertaining bit of background colour or trivia for fans to savour.

Some Nick Cave links

Kingdom In The Sky
40 minutes of highlights from December 2022’s concerts at Hanging Rock.

Nick Cave and the bruises of experience
A recent interview by Richard Fidler for ABC

Albums of 2022

A good year for new music, I reckon! Here are some of my favourites.

Bats – Blue Cabinet
Gwenno – Tresor
Courtney Marie Andrews – Loose Future
Kevin Morby – This Is A Photograph
Julia Jacklin – PRE PLEASURE
Duncan Marquiss – Wires Turned Sideways In Time
Modern Studies – We Are There
Cass McCombs – Heartmind
Katy J Pearson – Sound Of The Morning
Caitlin Rose – CAZIMI
Spoon – Lucifer On The Sofa
Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith & Emile Mosseri – I Could Be Your Dog / I Could Be Your Moon
Suss – Suss (compilation of Night Suite/Heat Haze/Winter Was Hard/Across The Horizon EPs)
Laura Veirs – Found Light
Jake Xerxes Fussell – Good And Green Again

And some reissues. One is a welcome re-release of an extremely rare EP (750 copies, sold on tour only) I’d never have had the chance to hear otherwise. The other is a bold revision of an album I already knew inside out, as much an explosion as an expansion of one of the more quixotic Manics LPs.

Broadcast – Mother Is The Milky Way
Manic Street Preachers – Know Your Enemy

As usual for mid-December, I’ve ended up with an equally long list of stuff I somehow missed, cribbed from everyone else’s selections.

Books of 2022

My favourite new books I read this year, from engrossing historical fiction to Jarvis’ music memoir prompted by the contents of his loft – and including a few picture books my son and I have enjoyed endlessly.

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The Manningtree Witches by A.K. Blakemore
Sea of Tranquility by Emily St. John Mandel
The Perfect Golden Circle by Benjamin Myers
My Name Is Yip by Paddy Crewe
Good Pop Bad Pop by Jarvis Cocker
Utterly Dark and the Heart of the Wild by Philip Reeve
Mina by Matthew Forsyth
A Good Place by Lucy Cousins
Billy and the Pirates by Nadia Shireen