‘All critics are failed writers,’ someone with a New Zealand accent said on Desert Island Discs the other day.
‘All critics are failed writers,’ someone with a New Zealand accent said on Desert Island Discs the other day. Obviously I have completely blanked out who it was, but I do know she was talking out of her fundament. Most of us become critics not just because we need the money (please send all cheques payable to me c/o The Spectator) but because we love the subject of which we write, and obviously because other critics drive us potty. The Pet Shop Boys have a new album out, which I haven’t yet heard, but I have read some of the reviews, one of which floated the iconoclastic notion that the Pet Shop Boys are electropop’s Ramones. In other words, all their albums sound the same. Which they don’t, of course, but the sniffy, lippy, doubtless teenage critic who wrote this is unlikely to have gone to the effort of listening to their many albums before making this judgment. Saying they are electropop’s Ramones isn’t criticism, it’s the pleasure of hearing your own voice after six pints of lager.
And yet, and yet. If criticism has any role in these busy and excessively analytical times, it’s surely to get things wrong. A while ago I put forward the notion that there were certain bands or singers of whom you would only ever need one album, and there was no need to waste time listening to anything else they ever did. I cited the Lyle Lovett problem, in that all the albums I had heard by this plug-ugly Texan troubadour sounded pretty much identical. His second, 1988’s Pontiac, is a cracker and all the others make you wish you were playing Pontiac. Then there was Tracy Chapman, earnest folksinger of the late 1980s, copies of whose debut album sit unplayed in many a liberal middle-class home, including mine. I may have suggested, with a slight smirk, that I could not imagine any circumstance in which I would buy another Tracy Chapman album. And I haven’t bought another one. Nonesuch, her latest label, sent it to me in the post. I’m glad they did.
For in the intervening years when I haven’t been listening, Chapman has developed into a fine singer-songwriter. Tracy Chapman was an album with a message, with the music serving the lyrics and the lyrics always serving a higher purpose. The new one, Our Bright Future, is mainly an album of love songs. Co-produced by Larry Klein, who was once married to (and still works with) Joni Mitchell, and has produced good recent work by Walter Becker and Madeleine Peyroux, it has a supple musicality you would never have expected from the woman who sang ‘Fast Car’. The lyrics and music are in balance, her voice has mellowed, and like late Cohen it’s all undercut with a wonderful dry humour.
Then someone recommended Lyle Lovett’s 1996 album The Road To Ensenada, which I had heard, but obviously not heard, because I had since disposed of it. I have another copy now. It is magnificent: a huge leap forward for Lovett, who put so much into it that he has struggled to follow it up ever since. The songs operate on the cusp of folk and country and blues and jazz, as always with Lovett, but they have a substance even my old favourite Pontiac lacks. These two albums form the bedrock of the current Berkmann playlist.
All of which completely demolishes my theory, feeble small thing though it was. And in writing such drivel in the first place, maybe I too have inspired someone else to become a critic and do it properly. Critics are failed writers? Pah. Critics are failed critics? Now you’re talking.
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