Last year, the Proms had a ‘Northern Soul’ special concert; and Benjamin Myers won the Goldsmith’s Prize for Cuddy, his polyphonic novel about St Cuthbert’s afterlife. I do not think he will win the prize again this year for Rare Singles, his novel about Northern Soul. I am glad about the Prom though, since I knew very little about the music; and listening to it did not appreciably deepen my enjoyment of this novel. Sentimentality is not a bad thing per se, but it is a difficult genre to do well, and Myers doesn’t do it half badly.
The central figure is Earlon ‘Bucky’ Bronco, an elderly American widower wracked by pain, whose musical career comprised two singles, one barely released and both largely forgotten. But the flame has been kept alive by soul aficionados in Scarborough, and Earlon is to be the guest of honour in an unlikely comeback. It has been organised by Dinah, a no-nonsense, put-upon woman. Her son, Lee, has a Filipino fiancée he has never met, who ‘seemingly had a thing for under-employed, under-qualified twenty-something stoners with porn addictions who still lived with their parents’. Her husband, Russell, is a drunk layabout wearing ‘boxer shorts she bought for him four prime ministers ago’. She doesn’t know it yet, but Bucky has lost his opioids and is terrified of appearing.
The hooks are clearly marked. Will Bucky’s comeback be apocalyptically embarrassing, and will it need the pharmaceuticals? The third act is well-paced between flashbacks and the closure; and the whole has a pleasantly distinctive humour – Scarborough is ‘Scarbados’, and Dinah fantasises about offing ‘psychopathic’ seagulls with ‘tiny grenades secreted in Scotch eggs’. It would work well as a 90-minute Sunday evening drama, and I could see Jeffrey Wright as Bucky and the ghost of Victoria Wood as Dinah.
The other characters are really just cameos. I could almost, having now acquainted myself with the must, imagine how R. Dean Taylor’s ‘There’s a Ghost in my House’ would fit certain elegiac and ruminative scenes. Myers makes a wise call in not describing the actual songs and leaving them to the imagination, although, with my suddenly acquired expertise, I’d have thought there would be nods to the ‘three before eight’, for example.
This year the Proms had an orchestral tribute to Nick Drake, and given their affinities in the English mystical tradition, it would seem a far more obvious subject for Myers’s equally obvious talents. Rare Singles is deep-fried battered candyfloss, a slightly guilty and queasy pleasure. But a pleasure nonetheless.
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