Who do you think you are, Hilaire Belloc?

*Warning: contains content of a 'HEALTH AND SAFETY GONE MAD!' nature*

On my way back into Waterloo after a trip to Salisbury I saw a poster South West Trains had put up. Yellow background; picture in the bottom right of a stick man in the act of, or just after the act of, falling on his head. Big black letters:

What went through the mind of the person who slipped on the platform?

The floor.

Smaller letters:

Last year 77 people fell on our platforms. Don’t let this trip be your last.

Cut to a platform in a suburban train station, early noughties. I’m waiting with some of my school chums, a couple of whom are sitting on the platform edge dangling their legs over the side. Not the best idea, sure – though they can see trains coming from half a mile away. A train going in the other direction hurtles past on the far platform. A red-faced, moustachioed man in uniform leans out of the window and shouts something at my chums, shaking his fist. His train will terminate at the next station, then double back to where we are, by which time all legs will be well out of harm’s way.

We are sitting in the carriage when the door opens and in comes our man. He is – there is no other word for it – bristling with righteous indignation. “So these are the schoolboys who like cheating with death!” he cries in triumph (mixing his clichés). He proceeds to tell us a cautionary tale about “Little Johnny” (the kid’s always called Little Johnny) who blah blah blah legs blah blah blah crying mother blah blah wheelchair – you get the idea.

The man’s name was Terry – I read it on his name badge – and he became a running joke of ours, a byword for petty and generally arsey behaviour. Sure, my chums were being irresponsible. Sure, he was doing his job and was concerned for their safety. But it was the way he expressed himself, the patronising cautionary tale that rankled.

Flashback over – cut to present day.

What went through the mind of the person who slipped on the platform?

The floor.

Last year 77 people fell on our platforms. Don’t let this trip be your last.

Everything about this ad annoys me. It’s trying to use the same tricks as those manipulative “Think!” ads, but failing. Ooh, let’s suck them in with a joke, then send them a CHILLING MESSAGE. Except – what’s the message? 77 people fell over in one year? Most of whom didn’t die? (If they did die, SWT have really failed on the shock-tactics front, as it’s not at all clear).

Bear in mind there are over 200 stations on the SWT network, including some of the busiest in Britain. Thousands upon thousands of people use these platforms every day. It would seem that their health and safety record is actually remarkably good.

So what’s the point of the ad? Do they really think we don’t know that if you run on a wet surface, you might fall over? Do they really think that anyone who is too stupid to realise that will read their ad? Couldn’t the money they spent focus-grouping, designing and producing it have gone towards, I don’t know, making rail travel affordable? What was going through their minds? (Not the floor, that’s for damn sure). The spirit of Terry is alive and well.

Review on The Literateur

There's a book review I wrote in the latest issue of The Literateur, which is a nifty new online magazine. It's great to be a part of the magazine, though admittedly the book I was given to review was a stinker. Read my vitriol here - unless you are the book's author, in which case please don't.

In defence of unyielding avarice

The other day I bought a copy of Getz/Gilberto, the definitive 1963 bossa nova album that features Stan Getz, Joao Gilberto, Astrud Gilberto and Tom Jobim. This is the record that brought bossa nova in general, and ‘The Girl From Ipanema’ in particular, into the mainstream in America. It’s a lovely album and, on a sunny day, the perfect accompaniment to my morning bagel.

I was more struck, however, by its liner notes. I think these were written as recently as 1997, by an American jazz writer called Doug Ramsey. He begins thus:

"It may seem that after Elvis came the deluge, but American popular music did not go into the tank overnight. In 1956, the year of his florescence, Presley dominated the charts with ‘Hound Dog’, ‘Heartbreak Hotel,’ and ‘Love Me Tender.’ Radio listeners could not escape Presley, Bill Haley, the Platters or Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers, but public taste allowed a few items of reasonable quality.

"Gone was the era when good music and popular were often the same. […] Still, at one time or another in 1956, Frank Sinatra’s ‘Love and Marriage’ and Dean Martin’s ‘Memories Are Made of This’ were in the top ten. Nelson Riddle made it with ‘April in Portugal,’ and Doris Day with ‘Que Sera Sera.’ Great stuff? No, but my god, ‘Heartbreak Hotel’?

"Popular music was sliding toward the day when salesmen, programmers, accountants, and marketers would manipulate the music business into one vast pop emporium.

"Before the music industry perfected the filtering system designed to eliminate the possibility of a record rising to the top on its musical merits, a few good ones slipped through."

(Ramsey cites the Dave Brubeck Quartet’s ‘Take Five’ and then turns his attention to Getz/Gilberto. He concludes:)

"As long as unyielding avarice rules the pop record business, it is unlikely that a jazz album will again dominate the charts. However, we have this imperishable reminder that it is possible for art music to kindle a response so universal that it becomes an indispensable element of the cultural environment. There’s hope."

I actually laughed out loud when I read this. And the jazz world wonders why it has a reputation for snobbery. I was also reminded of Harry Haller in Steppenwolf by Herman Hesse, which I am currently trying to adapt into a musical. Harry begins with much the same view of jazz music – which was just emerging in the 1920s dance halls where much of the novel is set – as a cheap, mindless form for the masses to gyrate to, infinitely inferior to his beloved Mozart and Haydn. It occurred to me that this has been an endlessly repeating cycle for much of musical history. A musical style begins as something visceral, instinctive, and designed for dance, then becomes absorbed into the establishment and becomes sterilised or intellectualised to the point where it is no longer danceable. So by the time trad jazz and swing had mutated into bebop and cool jazz, they were no longer fit for purpose as dance music. Similarly, bossa nova happened when Gilberto, Jobim etc took the infectious dance rhythms of the samba and cooled them down to the point where they were better suited to my morning bagel than to hip-shaking. From classical composers appropriating folk dances, to rock become prog-engorged, to Marvin Gaye making What’s Goin’ On, so many musical styles have moved, in their focus, from the hips to the head.

All of which is a roundabout way of guffawing at the ridiculously blinkered view offered by Ramsey’s notes. Not only does he posit that the music industry pre-1956 was avarice-free (ha!), he claims that not a single decent record ever rose to the top of the pop charts after 1963 (ha! ha!). Not only does he confuse "art music" with jazz (the jazz music in question being more often classified under "elevator music"), but he totally overlooks where jazz music came from and where rock ‘n’ roll went next. And much as I love Sinatra (I REALLY love Sinatra) I’m probably not the only person who’d rather listen to the Beach Boys than ‘Love and Marriage’...