Glom of Nit #38: Fare thee well 2024
Notes on an unexpected year
In this email you’ll find
A little essay on the year and some thankyous and pictures
Upcoming tour dates
Links to articles ands reviews I’ve written this month
An excerpt from my work-in-progress book Tinsel & Fire
2024 Books, Music, film and TV recommendations.
Hello there.
As often happens on New Year’s Eve (for that is today, unless you’re reading this in the future, in which case it was then, not now) the various social media platforms I subscribe to are flooded with end-of-year roundups. I’ve read a lot of pain this morning. A lot of frustration. A lot of wishing for the close of this particular door, and a better time on the horizon.
Which makes me feel pretty weird about my 2024. Because while I know the world has been on fire, in many places literally, and I know there has been so much pain and so much discomfort and tragedy on the micro and macro level for people I care about and the universe in general … my God, I think 2024 has been the best year of my life. Believe me, I feel horribly guilty about that.
Happiness is an odd thing to process. I’ve spent the last decade talking about pain and trauma, again micro and macro. There have been a lot of endings. Relationships. Work situations. Friends. Amid them, for much of that time, I have been really, really unhappy. Often I didn’t even realise until I was out the other side of that unhappiness. That pain was like a buzzing noise in your ear that you only notice when it stops. A weight that you only fully understand once it has lifted, but had dragged you down, down, down for years. I’ve got quite good at writing about misery, frustration, self-loathing, fear, imposter syndrome and the fall-out of failure. I’ve learned to make those things funny and accessible. It helps.
Is it possible to do that with contentment, too? Because this is the first time I can remember in a decade where I’ve not felt crushed by some gigantic, complicated, entirely self-inflicted anvil, where I’m not carrying guilt or anxiety. I’m just … happy. I sleep well. I look forward to the day ahead. I get excited about going home. It shouldn’t feel so weird to say this. We all deserve to feel like that.
Professionally, 2024 has been a doozy. I’ve taken my show, The Magic of Terry Pratchett, all over the country, performing to roaring Victorian music halls in Leeds, Winchester, Leicester and Northampton, packed comedy clubs in Birmingham and Brighton and terribly polite arts centres in Tunbridge Wells and Salisbury. I’ve played to ravaging, obsessive fans at conventions, where I’ve had to speed into the punchlines and roll over the rhetorical questions to avoid the too-smart-by-half heckles, and done the show to the ultimate away crowd of the Latitude festival, where to my surprise a rammed tent of 500 people turned up at 10.30am to see me do jokes about my favourite author and sat through it like a theatre audience. I returned to the Edinburgh Fringe and had a Hollywood superstar come to the show. And while that was happening, I finished writing a book about one of my favourite bands ever and signed a deal for my next one, which I’m already halfway through (actually I suspect the book will get longer than planned, they usually do … in which case, I’m probably a third of the way through). For the first time in a long time I didn’t worry about money much. At least until I got my tax bill. I’m not sure that will be the case in 2025 (especially after the tax bill), but it certainly has been nice while its lasted.
There's a few people I need to thank for all of that — Dave Collier, who has patiently driven me across the country, putting up with my motion sickness and holier-than-thou musical tastes, Corrie McGuire, the agent who has put the tour dates together and, somehow, continued to extend them into an indefinite and unending future, contributing greatly to said financial security, and Rob Wilkins, whose support as one of the executors of Sir Terry’s estate and, more importantly, as a dear friend, has made a lot of the above possible. I don’t think I know anyone that works harder than Rob Wilkins or cares more about what he does. If you’re a Terry Pratchett fan, then you will likely never know quite how much you owe him.
What’s probably more nourishing than that, though (although not to my ego) has been home. I left London just over a year ago, something I never thought I’d do, to start a new life as a family man in Bristol. Someone who has teenage stepsons, a three-bedroom house (rented, obviously, I’m not made of money) and a lack of a really good coffee place within a short walk. I genuinely didn’t know if that would suit me after nearly two decades in a love affair with the capital.
It does. It really does. I genuinely love having a family. I love doing the shopping and the cooking and moaning at a teenager about the state of his room and listening to him talk about anime that I will never understand. I love hunkering down and our family routines. I love not going out. My god, I love that. Staying in is amazing.
And for that, of course, I need to thank my darling Melanie, the partner for whom I shunted my life from East London for the SouthWest. The most ridiculous person I have ever met in my entire life, and quite the most delightful. Often in life you meet people and you think “I have met this person before. I know them”. There are only about six people on the planet, replicated and duplicated and photocopied to greater or lesser extents. Then there’s Melanie. I have never met Melanie before. I don’t think I will do again. Some people are Xerox copies, and some people are the original. And the sort of original made with specially coloured ink and watermarks to ensure they can never be copied. Mostly for the good of society.
So I need to thank Melanie too. Which I do, most days. And will continue to do so.
There’s other thank yous to make. Every person whose bought a book or ticket. Every person whose clicked a link or shared an article. The many, many people who have come up to me after a show to talk or dropped an email about something I’ve written. I’ve never taken it for granted. I can’t believe I get to do all of this for my job, and I will forever be grateful for this silly, brilliant life I have been given.
Can it be sustained into 2025? Beyond? Will I be felled by tax bills and not focussing my professional life around Terry Pratchett? Will Australia reject me utterly, and Edinburgh kick me out? I don’t know. I genuinely don’t. Whatever happens next, though, I have 2024. You can’t take it away from me. I’ll hold it in my heart forever.
See you next year, amigos.
Marc B
x
Tour update
The Magic of Terry Pratchett 2024 Tour
31 JAN & 1st FEB Quay Arts centre ISLE OF WIGHT TICKETS
14 FEB The Stables MILTON KEYNES TICKETS
15 MARCH The Attic SOUTHAMPTON TICKETS
28 APRIL Duchess Theatre LONDON TICKETS
21 SEPT Theatre Severn SHREWSBURY TICKETS
Adelaide Fringe
I’m very proud to be bringing the show to Australia, my first ever visit!
21 FEB - 4 MARCH Arthur Art Bar ADELAIDE TICKETS
We’re working on some more dates while I’m out there.
Stuff I’ve written this month
'YMCA' is a gay anthem - even if its co-writer didn't write it that way (i News)
We opened presents and discovered Mum had fallen for a Christmas scam (Metro).
A small note on this one — I didn’t write this headline, and I feel like it really misrepresents the article I wanted to write, which was about the danger AI books pose to authors and consumers. Metro pushed the article into something I had never really intended it to be. Sorry Mum!
Doctor Who Christmas Special: Joy to the World Review (HeyUGuys)
Recommendations - The best of 2024!
Albums
Smashing Pumpkins — Aghori Mhori Mei
English Teacher — This Could Be Texas
Cindy Lou — Diamond Jubilee
Kim Deal — Nobody Loves You More
Wish — Triple Seven
The Cure — Songs For A Lost World
Idestroy — Idestory
Lovely Eggs — Eggsistentialism
Fontaines DC — Romance
King Hannah — Big Swimmer
AURORA — What Happened To The Heart?
METZ — On Gravity Hill
Taylor Swift —The Tortured Poets Department
Books
CK McDonnal — Relight My Fire
Gabby Hutchinson Crouch — Cursed Under London
Alex James — Over The Rainbow: Tales From An Unexpected Year
Joanna Hagan — Friends & The Golden Age of the Sitcom
Kathleen Hannah — Rebel Girl
Katy Brent — The Murder After The Night Before
Michael Cragg — Reach For The Stars (technically 2023, but the paperback is out this year)
Paul Kidby — Designing Terry Pratchett’s Discworld
TV
Baby Reindeer (Netflix)
Married At First Sight UK (E4)
The Traitors (BBC One)
Star Wars: Skeleton Crew (Disney+)
Boybands Forever (Netflix)
Mr McMahon (Netflix)
Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power (Prime Video)
Wolf Hall: The Mirror and the Light (BBC One)
Doctor Who (BBC One)
The Bad Batch (Disney+)
Films
I am really, really behind on films this year due to all of the touring and writing, but these are three I really loved:
Longlegs
Blur: To The End
Deadpool & Wolverine
Work in progress book excerpt
This in an excerpt from the book I’m working on right now, due out this time next year. Please don’t share it, and remember this is a work in progress and could change hugely before publication.
TINSEL & FIRE: The Rise & Fall of the Christmas Number One
Chapter Six: Now is the Winter of Our Disco Tent
The 1977 Christmas number one, meanwhile, was another of those unstoppable monsters that hit the charts and refused to budge for months. ‘Mull of Kintyre’, by Paul McCartney’s post-Beatles outfit, Wings, went straight in at number five at the end of November, bobbed to the top the following week and stayed there until February. It was McCartney’s first post-Beatle number one and would go on to break his former band’s record for the best-selling single in British history1 before it finally fell off the chart in early March, three months and two million sales later. For much of December it was selling 100,000 copies a day.
McCartney has always had unneringly populist instincts — this was, after all, the man that had penned ‘Let It Be’, ‘Hey Jude’ and ‘Yesterday’, and who had the smarts to write a love song, ‘She Loves You’, in the second person in an era when everyone else was singing about themselves. His popular touch hadn’t exactly deserted him since the break up of the Beatles — Wings had been doing serious business as a live band and their albums were, more or less, critically acclaimed and generally sold well. His singles career was a little spottier, as all the former Beatles’ had been, though he’d still had his fair share of proper hits, especially the cuts from the Band On The Run album – ‘Jet’, and the title track – and his James Bond theme, ‘Live and Let Die’. What distanced Wings’ from The Beatles though, was cool. The Beatles, from the very beginning to the very end, were the coolest band in the country. Maybe the world. They were on the cutting edge, first overtaking the zeitgeist and then coming to define it. The individual power of the fab four, however, had been dissipating gradually across the decade. John Lennon had managed to establish pop Christmas songs as a worthwhile pursuit, sure, but ‘Happy Xmas’, now six years old, had been the last time he’d even grazed the top 20. His most recent single, 1975’s ‘Ya Ya’, hadn’t charted. McCartney was fairing better, but was scoring his biggest hits with his least interesting work. His best charting single with Wings had been ‘Silly Love Songs’, a number two in 1976, ostensibly a defence of his reputation for sentimentality (largely levelled at him by John Lennon) but ultimately just a confirmation of it. It had all been pretty weak sauce. Its a reputation that ‘Mull of Kintyre’ would do little to dissipate.
The “Kintyre” of the title refers to a peninsula in the southwest of Scotland, where McCartney had owned a farm since the late 60s and the titular “Mull” was a hill at its’ southwesternmost tip.2 McCartney and his family spent much of their time there and had fallen rather in love with the place. Noting that Scottish pipe bands played any number of traditional songs – ‘Scotland the Brave’, ‘Auld Lang Syne’, ‘St Mary’s’ (known these days as the melody for ‘Amazing Grace’), ‘The Hundred Pipers’ – but seemed to have no new compositions to perform, McCartney, who as it happens has no Scottish ancestry, went about writing a new Gaellic standard — a deeply romanticised tribute to his adopted home. It was recorded on his farm in the late summer of 1977, a simple two-chord ditty in waltz-time, written purposefully to sound as old as the hills it depicted. On it, McCartney and guitarist and cowriter Denny Laine are joined by local bagpipers, the Campbeltown Pipe Band. The result was soppy, sentimental, cosy and possessed of about as much edge as a packet of shortbread. It did, however, feature a melody that genuinely felt like it had been kicking around for 500 years or so.
No record had ever sold two million copies in Britain before. Not Elvis, not the Beatles, certainly not Showaddywaddy. Not even ‘White Christmas’, a song ‘Mull’ has quite a bit in common with. It’s not an exciting song (despite McCartney throwing in one of those Little Richard whoops he does just before the fade out). It’s not even especially beautiful. But it is, undeniably, comforting. That cosy, hummable melody, those warm acoustic guitars, that toffee-tin pipe band, those satisfying key changes. It’s a warm bath of a record. And it seemed to be what people needed in that moment. Maybe it was a balm in a bleak economic landscape? Maybe it was an antidote to the unfamiliar and threatening shape of punk which, though not bothering the charts, was rarely out of the news. Maybe its’ portrait of highland life called to a nostalgia for a simpler time, one few in the UK had ever truly experienced. Whatever the reason, it quickly outsold the rest of the chart, and then every other pop record there had ever been, at least in the UK.3
It probably would have done spectacular business at any time of the year, but ‘Mull of Kintyre’ was especially suited to Christmas. It is, after all, close cousins to the most famous Christmas song of them all: there wasn’t a sleighbell or a snowflake in sight, but what were “smiles in the sunshine and tears in the rain” if not “where the treetops glisten and children listen” with a different weather report? Both songs were reaching back to something idealised, possibly even fictional, trading on a nostalgia for how things should be. Just like the ones we, at least in some vague racial memory, buried in our subconscious, used to know. ‘Mull of Kintyre’ and ‘White Christmas’ are cut from the same cloth … despite the fact that one was a pion to Scotland written by a Scouser and a Brummie, and the other a yearning for traditional rural Christmas written by a Russian-born Jewish New Yorker.4 Bing Crosby may have departed, but his spirit was alive and well.
Whatever the reason, the public embraced ‘Mull of Kintyre’ in all of its’ plodding, super-traditional, hymnal glory. Top of the Pops aired the video for ten weeks in a row, it was played constantly on both Radio 1 and Radio 2, and it simply kept on selling. The band performed the song live on the Mike Yarwood Show’s Christmas Day special,5 one of the most watched TV broadcasts of the 70s, pulling in over 21 million viewers. It gave the song a further springboard into the new year. Even the most hardened cynic watching at home on Christmas Day, stuffed with turkey and roast potatoes, couldn’t help but feel a little wistful when the dry ice parted and the Campbelltown Pipe Band strode out from behind silvery Christmas trees.
McCartney had been initially hesitant about putting it out at all; worried that a music press obsessed with the Sex Pistols and the Damned would be hostile and younger pop fans would reject it outright. Hedging his bets, he made the single a double a-side; backed with a more upbeat rocker called ‘Girls’ School’, which was felt to be a more modern and credible alternative to the trad ballard on the other side of the disc, though in truth it sounds more like a second rate Queen than a contemporary of The Clash. Radio barely touched it and McCartney’s “pornographic St. Trinians”, as he termed it to Record Mirror that November, has been justly forgotten. As it turns out he needn’t have worried anyway. In his book The Lyrics: 1956 to the Present he tells a story about being hailed by a punk in London when his car stopped at some lights, shortly after the song’s release. He expected to get a gobfull of abuse. Instead the punk said “Oi, Paul, you know that ‘Mull of Kintyre’? It’s f*cking great!”.
A record held by The Beatles’ ‘She Loves You’ since 1963.
When viewed on a map the peninsular looks a little like a flaccid phallus, leading to a persistant urban legend about a “Mull of Kintyre rule”: a much-denied and probably apocryphal guideline of the British Board of Film Classification (BBFC) that states that a penis depicted on screen would be deemed to be inappropriately erect if it ascended to an angle higher than the Mull of Kintyre.
Though ‘Mull of Kintyre’ was a legitimate world wide hit, especially in countries with British and Scottish ex-pat communities (McCartney still plays it live when he performs in Canada, Australia and New Zealand), and an astonishing smash at home, it’s one of the few McCartney hits to be utterly ignored in the United States, where radio completely passed over it. It was probably the bagpipes.
You can even argue that Paul McCartney, initially a pioneer, unashamedly popularist, hugely prolific and able to crystalise snapshots of real life in the most naggingly hummable form, is to the second half of the 20th century what Irving Berlin was to the first.
Yarwood was a popular comedian and impressionist and one of the biggest stars of the era, though as his routines were mostly topical his shows haven’t aged brilliantly, since 21st century audiences are unlikely to get most of the jokes or recognise impressions of Dennis Healy and Edward Heath.
Thanks for being rad as hell this year! And tell Melanie I still have her Assembly pass sitting on my cabinet and will get it back to her.... any day now (/s, obviously?)