Love Sunshine

Il Penseroso

I have to accept that summer is officially cancelled, and winter has queue-jumped autumn, and must put a brave face on it. Actually, no, that is simply beyond me. But instead of unloading a torrent of righteous indignation as the heavens deliver theirs of cold, wet, windy despair, or instead of muttering a plaintive elegy over this stillborn summer, I will attempt a more philosophical perspective on these circumstances. No easy task, but here goes...

I was led to pursue this line by a response to my last blog from anonymous (whom I darkly suspect of hailing from sunnier climes), that fine weather doesn't produce the best poems. The implication is that grey skies and creativity might be more conducive bedfellows, and that this is somehow a silver lining to the brooding bleakness enveloping us (me) at present. Might there be something in this? Sidestepping poetry for the moment, pop music does lend some support to this notion. Jeremy Paxman suggests something of the kind in his book, The English - when he proposes the “reasonable supposition that cold wet weather, which forced teenagers to stay indoors in winter instead of going to the beach or skiing, probably has something to do with the country’s capacity for inventive rock music”. But we can go even further, not just pop music per se, but miserable pop music. The British didn't invent pop music, and didn't really invent many strains of it. We are particularly good at adapting it, giving it a particularly edgy feel and sound, and adding lyrical genius. And if you look at what is characteristic about what we contribute to the pop canon, and, more significantly, what is most successful as an export, a discernible and distinctive trait sums this up - misery. We are maestros of musical melancholy, and frankly, who can wonder in this climate?

I'm serious. If you think about it, there's an awful lot of misery in British pop, and especially the most successful exports. The obvious one is Goth. One of the few truly home-grown British pop product lines, it is a highly successful global export of long-standing, and Alien Sex Fiend ought to be given the Queen's Award For Industry for what they spawned 25 years ago. And then there is Morrissey. I don't know of a single male Italian of a certain age, who does not worship Morrissey and the Smiths. There's one who lives down below me, who will spend warm sunny days (when we had them) in doors, listening to tales of rainy Salford, and finding this exotic and beguiling. The rain falls hard on a humdrum town, and a good part of the globe (and generally the sunnier parts of it), lap that rain up by the bucketload. It is particularly ironic that Morrissey moved to LA and then latterly Rome, but it doesn't stop him singing about the 'slate grey Victorian skies' he left behind, and which those in his adopted home find strangely enticing. Radiohead don't sing about the weather (I'm not sure what they sing about, to be honest), but they look and sound like they've spent their whole lives starring out the window at rain, and they are, I'm told, the most successful band to break America since the Beatles. Hmm. I suppose the Beatles weren't miserablists at first, not in their mop-top, happy, jangly days; but it's interesting to see what America produced to meet the threat of the British invasion. What could they do to meet the challenge of muddy Mersey merriment? Hit back with sunshine. The Beach Boys, the Byrds, and then the whole San Fran scene, until sunshine won the battle, and the Beatles themselves joined the hippie trail to the sun. Depeche Mode - started off as electrobubblegum popsters, and delighted few outside these shores - got darker, darker still, so dark the lead singer tastes death momentarily - and they're an international sensation, while they can scarcely get arrested at home.

So, what does this suggest? Simply, that our climate cultivates mouldy misery, that more fortunate cultures enjoy like rich truffles, damp with our despair. This is a silver lining of a kind, I suppose. But I ain't seeing any of the royalties.