#Blogtour #Review - Dashboard Elvis is Dead by David F Ross

Dashboard Elvis is Dead
David F Ross
Orenda Books, 8 December 2022
Available as: PB, 300pp, e, audio
Source: Advance copy
ISBN(PB): 9781914585401

I'm grateful to Karen at Orenda Books for sending me a copy of Dashboard Elvis is Dead to consider for review and to Anne at Random Things Tours for inviting me to join the book's blogtour.

In Dashboard Elvis is Dead, David F Ross hacks into the secret history of the early 1980s music industry, giving us an inside account of the rise and spectacular fall of The Hyptones, a band of young Glaswegian hopefuls for who everything goes wrong on a fateful tour of the US.

A tour which is a downfall for Ross too, because David F Ross appears in the book as the failed writer who documented the band's experiences and was badly burned by doing so. (So fact, fiction and identity are blurred form the start with real musicians, actors and artists appearing with and - one suspects, sometimes without - approval throughout the book).

Thirty years later, in the wake of the Scottish independence referendum, Ross picks up with Jude Montgomery, a revered photo journalist, who's arrived in Glasgow. What they seem to have in common is a love for, and a fascination with, the Hyptones and their one hit, An Independent State of Mind, which has become an anthem for the Yes campaign.

It will take the rest of the story to explain how everyone's paths cross, and especially how Jude, who was running away from her Texas trailer park home when she came across The Hyptones the first time, fared in between. That story is an amazing saga of growth and suffering, of finding identity and seeking redemption, that frankly could have driven a whole sequence of novels. I loved Jude's honesty and her self-analysis. I loved Ross's evocation of the racially divided, tense Texan town from which Jude starts. I ,loved the portraits of 1980s San Francisco, of gentrifying New York later in the decade and in the 90s. Most of all I loved Jude. She is a well realised and sympathetic character who just has an awful habit of doing the wrong thing at the wrong time. Generally driven by good intentions, Jude makes mistakes, burns bridges as if she had shares in the ferry company, and generally leaves a trail of damaged and more or less resentful (or, in one case, dead) friends, mentors, exes and employers across the USA. Nevertheless, she perseveres, and through this story she's visibly growing, exploring her own identity and, in a somewhat twisted way, trying to make amends. (Ultimately it's down to her that An Independent State of Mind isn't wholly forgotten). 

I wouldn't say the same of Jamie, a tragic figure who is the other focus of Dashboard Elvis. Jamie is at the centre of The Hyptones, and he's the one who takes the fall when things go wrong. At his core he believes I think that he deserves that - the band has its own secret history - but really that isn't fair. Everyone deserves a chance, or a second chance, but ultimately Jamie's guilt robs him of that, leading him mon a destructive path that only reinforces the guilt. 

In describing the trajectory of the band, Ross brings the same sensibility to the lives and aspirations of young working class Scots in the 70s and 80s as he did in his Disco Days trilogy and in There's Only One Danny Garvey. Their voices ring true, lighting up the pages of the book in expressive Scots, albeit slightly indignant, as though being exhibited in a novel wasn't how they expected to spend the evening. (The exception is Jamie's girlfriend, the enigmatic AFB, 'Anna F*****g Belle' who in contrast uses standard English, a slight marker of class or privilege that prefigures her role in the later parts of the book).

There's an interesting contrast between the lives of Jude, who did manage to "get out" but, as her story makes clear, had to sacrifice a lot along the way, and the band members who as I've alluded to above, are basically on a downward slope throughout the book. Especially Jamie. Like Jude, Jamie makes many bad decisions and ends up with lots of regrets. But he's less in a position to try and put things right. The parallels and differences between Jamie and Jude are fascinating, posing a whole series of what if questions revolving around gender, racial identity and social setting. Both deserve a way out.  Jude gets one, Jamie doesn't, a fate he shares with most of his bandmates. 

This is eventually portrayed in a brilliant piece of non-writing. After sections dealing with the two fairly evenly, eventually Ross sort of has Jamie just... fade away, again contrasting with Jude whose climactic scenes are vivid and consequential. While Jamie's location and eventual fate are key plot points, we don't actually see them, and this building absence of a character is an eloquent way to express what he's become in the lives of those who knew him and those who don't. His absence is almost a more pointed depiction of him than his presence could be.

Oh I could go on praising this book but really, if you don't want to read it by now then what's the point of you? Just take my advice and read Dashboard Elvis is Dead. It's so many things. A very funny book. A sharp examination of young lives, of origins, identity and the complications of living, ageing and "growing up". A bit of a satire on dependence and independence. And a complex, engaging story set where music, crime, social aspiration, lust and politics overlap and mutate. 

Just pure brilliance.

For more information about Dashboard Elvis is Dead, see the publisher's website here - and of course the other stops on the blogtour which you can see listed on the poster below. 

You can buy Dashboard Elvis is Dead from your local high street bookshop or online from Bookshop UK, Hive Books, Blackwell's, Foyle's, WH Smith, Waterstones or Amazon.

 

Review - Scabby Queen by Kirstin Innes

Scabby Queen

Kirstin Innes

4th Estate, 23 July 2020

Available as: HB, 385pp, e, audio

Read as: PB advance copy

ISBN: 9780008342296

Snap verdict: Just wow!

Scabby Queen is a beautiful patchwork of a book, told from multiple points of view and in multiple ways, covering a period of fifty years. It's a maze, a kind of intellectual (and emotional) pinball machine, bouncing back and forward, sometimes predictably, sometimes not. But it does all fit together - and the impact isn't so much from the glittering, zinging concept as from the warm, intimate, portrayals of people and relationships which Innes does with aplomb.

The book is about Cliodhna (Clio) Campbell, musician, activist, resident of a squat, Twitter warrior, a shooting star who blazes through peoples' lives to varying effect: inspiring, exasperating, exhausting. The one thing you can't do is ignore her. Springing to fame in the early 90s with her anti Poll Tax anthem, Rise Up! she's then written off as a one hit wonder but comes back again and again.

Clio's life is seen mainly through the numerous women and men who she touches. Some of the encounters are one offs - a nurse in a hospital, a passenger on a train - while some repeat (journalist Neil, Sammi - an ex-comrade in a Brixton squat and later in other settings, Clio's dad's friend Donald). Some are wholly positive: others reflect a wariness both on Clio's part and on those whose lives fall into her orbit. It sounds complicated (and must have been fiendishly difficult to write) but Innes orchestrates everything with great skill and the book carries the reader along through highs and lows, revealing, concealing, stripping layers back, adopting different viewpoints to give new perspectives on all these same relationships - and an ever richer, ever rounder, view of Clio herself. The book is  restless, like Clio, a woman who compels attention even in death: Scabby Queen opens with her suicide - not a spoiler, we learn this almost immediately - but mostly revels in her fierce and blazing life.

There are surprisingly few occasions in which we see Clio gives her own perspective: a desperately sad monologue to her husband as their short lived marriage folds; a self-justifying email; a couple of impassioned speeches. Apart from these we're left to build our picture of Clio from those around her - those who love and those who hate her. It's not a simple picture, but we get a powerful image of a charismatic woman, always in motion, always seeking. She has a hard time, with a fractured family background and an entry into the music industry at the height of the Loaded culture. (There are a few convincingly sexist articles by ubiquitous journal Pete Moss - wasn't that the name given to a prehistoric body found  in a Cheshire bog? That seems just about right.) There is also a touching scene where Clio tries, unsuccessfully, to warn an up-and-coming young female singer of the dangers (though it's very do-as-I-say-not-as-I-do). 

It's a typical scene for Clio, who would I think say if you asked her that she tried to live a life in solidarity. Of course that's easy to say - but life is messy and there are plenty of examples here where Clio's solidarity is misplaced, unwelcome or just badly timed. Innes ranges wide, following Clio's campaigning career. We see Poll Tax protests, Iraq war protests, the Scottish independence referendum, a squat in Brixton, weddings, parties, parties and more parties and the backstage view of band tours. There are so many stories here, so many threads - it isn't only Clio who comes to life but a host of other characters as well, with their regrets, traumas and compromises - and a whole generation of political activism (I loved the portrayal of the nurse who had come alive with the Referendum campaign). The book has a sharp eye for detail. There are insights on the politics of smoking, the class implications of presenting oneself well (it's OK for middle class crusties in a squat to look untidy: the working class, at least working class women in the west of Scotland circa 1990, can't afford it. Being allowed to be scruffy is just another manifestation of privilege), Clio's accent shifting from one social setting to another, and the differences in the way that women and men living unconventional lives are judged (the women will be judged, the men won't).

That, in the end, is at the heart of this book. There's an unspoken question, a judgement, hanging over Clio throughout - how would a man doing similar things be seen? Clio is constantly assessed, measured, weighed up by everyone around her - even those who are devoted to her - in a way that the men doing similar things aren't. Even men who do worse - awful - things (the book gets very dark in places). 

Clio gets frequent criticism. I suspect in real life she'd often be very annoying (ask Xanthe or Sammi) and she makes terrible mistakes. She is impulsive, she isn't following a plan and she sometimes scorches people who get too close. She is, though, in the end palpably, a person of integrity. And many near her, palpably, aren't.

Scabby Queen (the story refers to a card game which stands as something of a metaphor for Clio) is often sad, a story of missed chances, no, expired chances, a story of time bearing things away before we even know they were there (the backwards and forwards between the years makes this very poignant, giving us endings and beginnings commingled). It's also, and paradoxically, often gloriously uplifting. 

An enthralling book both creating a vivid portrayal of Clio and committing a wonderful hack into the backstage, backstreet underpinnings of the last three decades. Never sentimental, but with a whopping emotional punch, Scabby Queen is a great read.

For more information about Scabby Queen, and an intro from the author, see the 4th Estate website here.

Blogtour - The Man Who Loved Islands by David F Ross

The Man Who Loved Islands (Disco Days No 3)
David F Ross
Brenda Books, 30 April 2017
PB, 302pp

I'm grateful to Orenda Books for an advance copy of this book - and proud to be starting off the blogtour.

First, full disclosure: I've read and reviewed the two preceding books in this series, The Last Days of Disco and The Rise and Fall of the Miraculous Vespas, and indeed am quoted at the front of the book. I can't pretend to be disinterested: I loved the earlier books and Islands is one of my eagerly awaited books of 2017.  Ross's trilogy is one of the most interesting and original recent publishing debuts and as someone growing up in the late 70s and early 80s, I find it nostalgic - but also tender, realistic and hopeful.

The third volume is just as good as the first two, bringing the series to a close (perhaps) but also back full circle. In The Last Days of Disco we saw Bobbie Cassidy and Joey Miller launch Heatwave Disco at the weddings, private functions and, indeed, discos of early 80s Ayrshire, and their subsequent entanglements with local hard men and police, alongside the tragedy of Bobby's brother, Gary's, involvement in the Falklands War.

Then, in Miraculous Vespas, Ross told the story of the eponymous band, a parallel tale dominated by the awful - and Mesmeric - impresario Max Mojo. The Vespas were apparently deeply influential on the music scene of the 80s and 90s, despite fading from view, and were due a revival. But it didn't exactly go as planned...

Now, everything is brought together, brought home.

The Heatwave boys, once the closest of friends, have scattered, seen success, seen heartbreak - and are now on the slide. Bobby made a successful career as a DJ on Ibiza but is now fading, haunted by guilt and being edged out of the classier venues. Joey is a successful architect but seems doomed just to wander the world's airports and corporate hotels, always jet lagged. He, too, is being pushed towards the door by the younger partners in a firm he helped to found.

So when Joey, drifting in China, gets a message from Bobby's - and his - old friend Hammy May, warning that Bobby is very ill, he sets out for a last goodbye. Thus begins a fresh roller-coaster ride of misunderstandings, bonkers plans, double crossing, embezzlement and, of course, music, music and more music, culminating in one of the most remarkable concerts Ayrshire will ever have seen.

I enjoyed the way that Ross took the two friends - or ex-friends - and showed what had become of them in later life. While there are some flashbacks, especially to explain Bobby's career ('the following decade passed by in a drugs-fuelled, hedonistic, self-indulgent blur') we don't see that much of the Disco period, nor, as the Vespas' story parallels that,  much of that book either book. Yet everything still dovetails with the earlier stories, picking up characters and plot strands one might not even have realised had been left unresolved and taking them to a conclusion (mostly).

The Ayrshire dialect is as thick as ever, and the characters as foul mouthed; I realised how much I'd missed Bobby especially, indeed, from the very star, while the action may be set in Ibiza or China we're home, as it were, even if the international angle gives Ross chance to skewer a much wider range of human folly and absurdity that the setting of the earlier books allowed or to indulge in comic sub plots (such as Hammy's encounters with the secret society of middle aged women on Ibiza...)

And there's the tender way Ross brings the two boys together again, older, flabbier, less fit and suffering from broken relationships and stupid misunderstandings but - inside - the same starry eyed chancers they always were. And then we also meet other old friends, until in the end it's almost like the best sort of school reunion (I imagine that s school reunion in Ross's retelling would be a wild affair to say the least).

There is nostalgia - Bobby's obsession, in his Ibizan villa, with that old black and white version of Robinson Crusoe that used be shown by the BBC every year in the summer holidays; a sharp dissection of the glory days of club music; recollections of school dancing lessons - 'a brutal and hideous experiment in child cruelty by way of state-promoted embarrassment'. Simply marvellous evocations of times and places gone, for better or worse.

There is also a strand of hope and redemption, with some scores settled, new relationships, and some bad business from the past sorted at last. All in all a satisfying (yet spectacular - you'd expect that) conclusion to the trilogy, and all immensely readable (Ross has some great turns of phrase - 'It was a goodbye kiss from a Goodbye Girl'; 'they also indulged like it was the last days of Caligula'; 'It is beginning to sound like the worts blues song ever').

It was, in the end, sad to part again from the Heatwave boys - but great to see them at their best again.

A book I'd strongly recommend, great summer reading or just great reading, if you don't want to wait.
(And if you haven't read the earlier books - why not? - start with those, you've got a treat in store).