On romanticising nationalised railways...

I am currently reading Ghost stations: essays and branchlines by Patrick McLoughlin. I am enjoying the book and why would I not? I am most interested in ghosts, stations, ghost stations, essays and branchlines. The author has an engaging tone and interesting back story with the author being an Oxford academic but having his roots in post-industrial Belgium. Even though not yet halfway through, I would not hesitate to recommend it.

Yet early on I started bristling at a point that I find typical of this genre of book, literary non-fiction about place and landscape. That is a tendency to venerate the public sector and damn the private sector, romanticise the days before ‘neo-liberalism’, while at the same time preaching against nostalgia.

So McLoughlin has a sideswipe at Michael Portillo for presenting a programme about railways when he is a ‘former privatisation-randy Tory ideologue’. He goes on to make a comment that it would be more appropriate if Portillo used Beeching not Bradshaw as a guide and travelled by car.

Now here goes. I am hardly a privatising Tory though I am admittedly on the economic liberal wing of the Liberal Democrats. I have a soft spot for Portillo in his post-political incarnation and enjoy his railway programmes. I think he genuinely reevaluated his worldview after the Tory defeat of 1997 and more so after he left politics, becoming less of a doctrinaire Thatcherite. It seems unfair to damn someone for views they once held and not acknowledge that they may have changed their mind. Also Portillo was once complimentary about my wife Dorothy when she was Mayor of Watford so to my mind that shows he can be capable of good judgement.

Whether or not influenced by my  positive perception of latter-day Portillo, I detect in McLoughlin’s comments a rhetorical sleight of hand that turns an aesthetic or cultural enthusiasm into an ideological test. I don’t know whether Portillo has repented for introducing rail privatisation nor how he would respond to McLoughlin. But I could hypothesise a reply that runs something like this.

“Why should it be seen as hostile to railways for someone who supports private enterprise to think they should be privately run? It means giving them the chance of more effective management. This is illustrated by rail journeys more than doubling during the era of privatisation, at least until the pandemic, whereas they declined under the nationalised British Rail. By definition I am travelling routes that have survived and even thrived under private management and of course they were originally built by private enterprise.

“More than that the Beeching cuts happened while the railways were nationalised, as did real and proposed acts of vandalism such as the destruction of the Euston Arch and the plan to demolish the magnificent Midland Hotel at St Pancras. Pre-privatisation British Rail was seen as a national joke – for example being damned as the biggest failure of all privatised industries in opinion polling conducted for Abrams and Rose’s famous 1960 publication Must Labour lose? – aresponse to that party’s third successive electoral defeat. So let’s not be nostalgic for it.”

I am playing devil’s advocate there to a degree. I know that rail use was increasing even before privatisation. The private sector is more than capable of poor service delivery, inefficiency and architectural vandalism. Other countries have successful state-run rail services so nationalisation can work and privatisation is no panacea – not least with the sense of fragmentation rather than one coherent service that has been such an annoying feature of rail travel in the last 30 or so years. Maybe the problem in the 1970s and before was how the railways were run not that they were state-run per se. There has even been a revisionist literature from the likes of Christian Wolmar arguing that the nationalised British railways were a success. I have no objection to the current government bringing railways back into public ownership and on some days might say I support it.

Yet there is something that annoys me at the cosy certainties of left-of-centre intellectuals, of which I am using McLoughlin as an exemplar, who seem to go weak at the knees at something being publicly owned while regarding private sector management as intrinsically perfidious. In reality one doesn’t need to listen to people’s experience of state-owned and run services for long to know it isn’t one long tale of kindness, public spiritedness and efficiency. I am reminded of Dennis Healey’s question, aimed at Tony Benn, of whether Labour really wanted to nationalise Marks and Spencer to make it as efficient as the Co-op. (To be fair that joke will have worked better in 1978 than it does today.)

Does this matter? Am I crossing the street to find fault with an author whose work I am actually enjoying? While I may be using him as an example, he does not represent the liberal left as a whole and should not stand proxy for it. Yet I bristle and baulk because I feel such attitudes are common on the left and not helpful when most people have a mixture of experiences of working for and receiving services from both public and private sector bodies and will have a more complex experience than public = good, private = bad. The fact that lefties do see it in such Manichean terms may just be something that voters will find off-putting.

George Eliot as Coventry City supporter

One of my occasional flights of fantasy is thinking anachronistically about what football teams historic political or cultural figures might have supported.

In that regard, I sometimes refer to George Eliot as a Coventry City supporter even though she died three years before the club was founded.

Prompted by Coventry City’s return to top-flight football after a 25-year absence and seeing the great author’s grave at Highgate Cemetery earlier in the summer, I have been pondering that a little more in the last few weeks. I think there are good reasons to see affinity between the two.

They are certainly her local team. As Mary Ann Evans, Eliot spent her childhood near Nuneaton, went to school in Coventry and lived there for many years. These days the whole area of Coventry and North Warwickshire is marketed as ‘George Eliot country’.

Not all authors, though, offer a favourable view of their home city. James Joyce and Dublin come most obviously to mind. The other author who one thinks of when Coventry is mentioned, Philip Larkin, was at best ambivalent about the city. Yet there is every reason to suppose that Mary Ann Evans had some affection for Coventry. While the events of Middlemarch – the eponymous town clearly based on Coventry –are hardly a long tale of happy harmony, no great novel is, the town itself is not portrayed unsympathetically.

There are other reasons though, grounded in her work, to see a connection between Eliot and the Sky Blues. She chose to set most of her novels in unglamorous, provincial settings, not always directly within the Coventry area but clearly drawing on that landscape. And Coventry City have never been a glamorous or fashionable club. While teams based in all other large Midland cities – Birmingham, Nottingham, Leicester and Derby – have had their moment of glory as English league champions, Coventry City’s only major national trophy was a single FA Cup win in 1987.

So the characteristics of a Coventry City supporter involve a degree of stoicism, persistence and determination to overcome adversity. They have had a lot of the latter to deal with in the last 25 years, as the club went down to the fourth tier and lost access to their home stadium, having to play games at different times in Northampton and Birmingham.

Eliot’s heroes and heroines demonstrate similar qualities: Dorothea Brooke in Middlemarch, Adam Bede and maybe most of all Tom Tulliver in The Mill on the Floss, stubborn but determined to recover from disaster. By contrast, those seeking glamour or having delusions of grandeur, Rosamund Vincy, Arthur Donnithorne or Edward Casaubon, are seen as ultimately destructive. Note: Anyone thinking from the above that ‘He’s only read three George Eliot novels and can’t remember them that well’ would be spot on.

So based on her place of birth and upbringing, I believe George Eliot would make a pretty good Sky Blues supporter. There is no great evidence of her being interested in team sport, although I suspect she might have found football crowds an interesting phenomenon. I don’t see her as a potential season ticket holder at the CBS Arena. But perhaps she would have raised her eyes from more cerebral matters, checked the results and smiled at a Coventry City win.

As the city is my birthplace, I am a lifelong supporter of Coventry City, if mostly a passive one. And after living here for 50 years, I have really transferred my loyalty to Watford FC, whose fortunes I follow far more closely. With the clubs being in different leagues this year I can cheer wholeheartedly for both without any sense of divided loyalties. I like to think that Mary Ann Evans, Coventrian and for a brief time Rickmansworth resident, will, despite her atheism, be doing the same from beyond the grave, and particularly this evening as the provincial and still unfashionable Sky Blues face the glamorous, wealthy and metropolitan might of champions Arsenal.

Number 1: Matthew Sweet - Devil With the Green Eyes

Before I begin, I should say that what I've learned from this little exercise is that perhaps I ought to try to listen to a bit more current music rather than things released years, even decades ago. Maybe I'll start listening to Radio 6 or buying Mojo magazine or something.

So the song I've played most this year is from 1993. In many ways Matthew Sweet should be one of my favourite artists - I love that jangly Byrds and Big Star influenced power pop sort of thing that he specialises in. He has also collaborated with the Jayhawks, one of my favourite bands of all time, and I once saw him live when he was part of a short-lived supergroup called The Thorns.

Yet each time I tried listening I came away thinking that it was nice enough, but nothing really to make me put it on again. Funnily enough I have the same sense of not liking his work as much as I expected to with the other Matthew Sweet, the historian and author of Inventing the Victorians.

This year I have given the musical Matthew Sweet yet another whirl in a bid to find out what it is I'm missing and I have warmed to him a bit more, in particular the 1991 album Girlfriend is consistently good and some of the songs on the Time Capsule best of compilation are very listenable. But nothing has compared to Devil With the Green Eyes, which I have listened to over and over again, this year, often hitting play again after the song has ended. 

With its haunting melody and guitar intro, distinctive use of harmony and background vocal, and dark lyrics about the destructive nature of jealousy, this is an awesome song that has been the runaway winner of my personal listening chart for 2024. The version I've linked to features Richard Lloyd from Television, who contributes a great closing guitar solo.

Number 2: Vigilantes of Love - On To Bethlehem

I take a further turn into obscurity today, albeit again with an artist who really deserves to be much better known. In many ways the best songwriter you've never heard of.

Vigilantes of Love, whose name was taken from a New Order song, was a vehicle for singer-songwriter Bill Mallonee. He at least started out under the alternative Christian music label and the lack of commercial success might stem from him having been too secular for the Christian market and yet too Christian for the secular market. 

And yet he has clearly had some mainstream affirmation, Emmylou Harris contributed vocals to one Vigilantes song, while Peter Buck out of REM co-produced an early album, and he has been named in one list of 100 best living songwriters.

He has also perhaps been too prolific, putting out around 50 albums in a career of about 35 years and while each one that I've heard has its high points, it can begin to sound a bit samey and there hasn't been much stylistic evolution. So one Vigilantes of Love or Bill Mallonee solo album can sound much like another.

Yet he has been a consistently very good songwriter and sometimes an outstanding one. Two albums from the 1990s, Killing Floor and Audible Sigh really deserve to be hailed as masterpieces. The review of the former that I've linked to describes their style as 'trying to get the biggest, most aggressive sound they can while using acoustic string instruments almost exclusively... a terrific set of Power Folk.' This seems as good a description as any of the Vigilantes sound..

This song is from a kind of outtakes album from the Audible Sigh album, 'Cross the Big Pond, recorded in 1999 in Cheltenham, apparently. This may at one level be considered a Christian song, but is also about soldiering on through adversity and looking positively to the future. Despite the title this isn't really a seasonal song, and it's one I listened to more in Lent than Advent.

Still, please listen and then explore further the Vigilantes of Love/Mallonee back catalogue at Bandcamp.

Number 3: Felice Brothers - Crime Scene Queen

Around 20 years, there were two bands I heard about via music magazine sampler CDs and whose work I started to follow and by one route or another acquire their music as it was released. One was the Decemberists and the other the Felice Brothers. Both were very distinctive musical styles and lyrics that made them not really like anyone else. Colin Meloy from the Decemberists sounded as if he had swallowed a thesaurus from the extensive and arcane vocabulary appearing in his songs, which also had unusual subject matter, songs about pirates, people being swallowed by whales and the like. Ian Felice used a lot of quirky wordplay, a bit Dylanesque but more playful. Both had a penchant for story songs.

As I no longer kept abreast of the charts or any other measures of popularity I never really knew which of the two was the more commercially successful. If anything the Decemberists seemed more likely to be the niche act and the Felice Brothers stronger candidates for mainstream success.

So I was surprised when seeing the latter at Islington Assembly Hall a couple of years back that they said this was a relatively large venue for them, and they normally play bars. The Decemberists by contrast have had hit records and perform at much bigger venues.

So this is leading to saying The Felice Brothers really do deserve to be better known. While they released a couple of fine albums early in their career, Tonight at the Arizona and a 2008 self-titled one, subsequent releases have been more inconsistent with occasional style changes that didn't quite work. But their 2022 record From Dreams To Dust is I believe truly outstanding album which I would encourage anyone who likes music in the broadly Dylanesque style to listen to. It ought to be regarded as a classic,

This year's long player, Valley Of Abandoned Songs is a more low key offering. As the title suggests it is a collection of songs that didn't quite fit on other albums, although I think all have been recorded afresh. But this is by no means an album of B-sides and rejects.

Crime Scene Queen is the opening track, a pretty good representation of what the Felice Brothers do. The addition of bassist and backing vocalist Jesske Hume a few years ago has brought another dimension to their music. This is also my top song that has actually been released in 2024.

Number 4: Bruce Cockburn - Closer To The Light

Bruce Cockburn has long been an artist I feel that I should like more than I actually do. He ticks all the boxes: sort of folk rock style singer-songwriter who writes intelligent and thoughtful lyrics. Yet I have never quite taken him to my heart. I listen to an album, think it's pretty good but then don't go back to it. Part of the problem is that I found some of his political songwriting in the 1980s overly didactic and dogmatic. (Don't get me wrong, as a fan of Bob Dylan and Neil Young I hardly object to political songwriting but I want to be moved rather than hectored.)

This year, though, I decided to give him another whirl, in particular his mid-1990s albums Dart To The Heart and The Charity Of Night. Both have a political as well as a personal dimension, but are less direct and in your face than his previous work, and the more rewarding for that. I've only just realised that both these albums were produced by T-Bone Burnett, which probably helps explain why I like them so much. Closer To The Light is an elegy to Cockburn's friend the songwriter Mark Heard who died tragically young at the age of 40 in 1992. I hope to write more about Heard another time, but this is a quietly powerful song that I ended up playing over and over.

Number 5: John Hiatt - Through Your Hands

John Hiatt is hard to categorise as an artist. He seemed to come out of the New Wave movement and could have been seen as an American Elvis Costello. But then he also seemed to be part of the Americana, new country thing and a bit like a rockier version of Steve Earle.

I suppose, though genres shouldn't matter. His best and most successful albums Bring the Family and Slow Turning were hardly off my turntable (or actually tapedeck) in the late 1980s. But then the quality of his albums dropped abruptly it seemed and I allowed myself to be influenced by poor reviews into not buying.

Because I did listen to him so much back then his work had laid fallow in my music app, but this year I have had a revival of interest leading me to listen to things I missed before. I don't know if this quite counts as a duet as the vocal contributions are unequal, but the lines sung by the Innocence Mission's Karen Peris really make the song.

While others in my list this year have been more nostalgic, this is looking positively to the future - a kind of pep talk from the angels.