Of late, my footsteps keep taking me past the clutter of a decent remaindered books outlet in the West End of that London. I've taken to stopping in for a brief mooch, mindful of all the interesting reads I've been turned onto by these places over the years, as mentioned in a recent ramble around the upside of time-killing.
This particular shop has proven to be particularly well-stocked with the works of Jon Ronson, hence their numerousness on the this is my england reading list. In theory, I would have been happy to pay full price for any of these. It also seems unfortunate that non-fiction as consistently interesting and amusing as Ronson's can be had from the bargain bins. But the remaindering process is a gift horse. My means are not unlimited. So I cannot look it in the mouth.
On the most recent trip to this shop, I picked up another of Ronson's books, wondering for the first time ever whether he had written something unlikely to be worth the discounted price I'd paid for it, let alone the original full price. It was, after all, extremely slender, weighing in at barely seventy pages. But given than less can be more, I was more wary of the subject matter than of the feathery size of this little thing. I was never, after all, much of a fan of Frank Sidebottom, the singing papier-mâché head brought squeakily to life in the 1980s and 1990s by the late Chris Sievey.
I did get the joke. Being a soft southern git did not prevent me from appreciating the comic mismatching of musical forms with obscure references to the quotidian details of life in the north of England. I must have even had some level of appetite for that particular brand of comedy because Half Man Half Biscuit were a fixture of my teenage mixtapes for a while. I was a fan of The Fall, too, a fact I mention because I contend that the magic realism of Mark E. Smith's lyrics and the knowing dourness of his delivery combine to create a comic effect not unalike the ones conjured up by Frank Sidebottom or by the post-punksters from the Wirral peninsula.
I just felt that the Birkenhead combo did the whole northern absurdism bit more amusingly and more satisfyingly than the persona created by Chris Sievey. Good grounds, then, for wondering how much I would enjoy Ronson's brief account of his time as a member of Frank Sidebottom's Oh Blimey Big Band and of his later co-writing of a fictionalised movie version of Sievey's strange life.
I needn't have entertained these doubts. I demolished those seventy pages in the time it took to eat some sushi and take two tube rides. On both journeys, I was that passenger you sometimes see struggling to suppress loud laughter and wiping hot tears of mirth from his face. This is only partly because the dingy gig venues and Students Union ENTS office described by Ronson were so close to the wonderful, half-recalled shitholes of my own youth. It is simply very funny and sweetly sad. So DO buy this. Buy it for very little in the remaindered book store. Or buy it full price. But get it. Get it.
This particular shop has proven to be particularly well-stocked with the works of Jon Ronson, hence their numerousness on the this is my england reading list. In theory, I would have been happy to pay full price for any of these. It also seems unfortunate that non-fiction as consistently interesting and amusing as Ronson's can be had from the bargain bins. But the remaindering process is a gift horse. My means are not unlimited. So I cannot look it in the mouth.
On the most recent trip to this shop, I picked up another of Ronson's books, wondering for the first time ever whether he had written something unlikely to be worth the discounted price I'd paid for it, let alone the original full price. It was, after all, extremely slender, weighing in at barely seventy pages. But given than less can be more, I was more wary of the subject matter than of the feathery size of this little thing. I was never, after all, much of a fan of Frank Sidebottom, the singing papier-mâché head brought squeakily to life in the 1980s and 1990s by the late Chris Sievey.
I did get the joke. Being a soft southern git did not prevent me from appreciating the comic mismatching of musical forms with obscure references to the quotidian details of life in the north of England. I must have even had some level of appetite for that particular brand of comedy because Half Man Half Biscuit were a fixture of my teenage mixtapes for a while. I was a fan of The Fall, too, a fact I mention because I contend that the magic realism of Mark E. Smith's lyrics and the knowing dourness of his delivery combine to create a comic effect not unalike the ones conjured up by Frank Sidebottom or by the post-punksters from the Wirral peninsula.
I just felt that the Birkenhead combo did the whole northern absurdism bit more amusingly and more satisfyingly than the persona created by Chris Sievey. Good grounds, then, for wondering how much I would enjoy Ronson's brief account of his time as a member of Frank Sidebottom's Oh Blimey Big Band and of his later co-writing of a fictionalised movie version of Sievey's strange life.
I needn't have entertained these doubts. I demolished those seventy pages in the time it took to eat some sushi and take two tube rides. On both journeys, I was that passenger you sometimes see struggling to suppress loud laughter and wiping hot tears of mirth from his face. This is only partly because the dingy gig venues and Students Union ENTS office described by Ronson were so close to the wonderful, half-recalled shitholes of my own youth. It is simply very funny and sweetly sad. So DO buy this. Buy it for very little in the remaindered book store. Or buy it full price. But get it. Get it.
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