Telling Stories By Tim Burgess Viking, £12.99All rock stars have their own tales of drugs, booze, crashed cars and trashed hotels. But how many bands can say one of their members was sent down for armed robbery?
At the height of their fame, the world of The Charlatans was rocked by the news that their keyboard player, Rob Collins, had been arrested after a botched hold-up at an off-licence. The charges were reduced when Collins’s lawyer convinced the judge that, having had a number-one album, Collins had no need to knock off an offie for £100. He was jailed for eight months; on the day of his release, he was whisked to the Top of the Pops studio to perform the band’s latest hit, Can’t Get Out of Bed. Phew, rock’n’roll.
The Charlatans crashed the Madchester party in 1990, elbowing past The Stone Roses and Happy Mondays to top the charts with their debut album, Some Friendly. The band built their psychedelic sound on Collins’s swirling Hammond organ and the Ian-Brown-meets-
Mick-Jagger vocals of their floppy-haired singer, Tim Burgess. Telling Stories is Burgess’s account of being in one of Britain’s most consistently popular bands (they’re going on tour again this summer), and, yes, there are plenty of drugs, a bit of sex and more than enough rock’n’roll, not to mention embezzlement (their accountant ran off with £300,000, a lot of money if you’re not The Rolling Stones), but Burgess tells it all with the same flair that makes him one of the most charismatic frontmen in British rock.
He grew up in a small village in Cheshire, in thrall to the sounds of New Order and an avid collector of anything with a Factory Records catalogue number on it. He was also an early adopter of a druggie lifestyle, beginning with preteen glue-sniffing and graduating to rock-star quantities of cocaine while on tour with The Charlatans. Inspired by an apocryphal story involving Stevie Nicks, the band tried a novel way of taking drugs: “To be precise, we discovered the process of blowing cocaine up each other’s arses.” The title of the chapter? “Cocainus”.
But though they survived the incarceration of their keyboard player and the embarrassment of their chosen method of administering drugs, the band came close to packing it all in when Collins died in a car crash, halfway through the recording of their album Tellin’ Stories and just weeks before they were to open for Oasis in front of 250,000 people at Knebworth.
They made it through the grief to perform the gig of their lives, and the subsequent album put them at the forefront of Britpop, just as their debut six years earlier had made them leading lights of the baggy movement. Burgess also got clean, and now lives in LA, where he still lives the rock’n’roll dream, only without the chemicals. He tells his story with a light, self-effacing touch and never sinks into poor-pop-star-me self-pity. He may be a Charlatan, but he’s not lacking in self-belief.
Kevin Courtney
Ireland on Show: Art, Union, and Nationhood
By Fintan Cullen
Ashgate, £65
In Ireland on Show, Fintan Cullen, professor of art history at the University of Nottingham, sets out to explore “the culture of display” of art in 19th-century Ireland. He also considers how Ireland was represented through such displays beyond its shores, particularly in Britain and the US, with an eye to the opposing claims of “a unionist ethos and a nationalist point of view”. For a variety of reasons, he argues, there has been little investigation of the subject by art and cultural historians.
In his approach he nods to Richard Altick’s The Shows of London, an influential study of several centuries of public shows and entertainments, and to Tony Bennett’s The Birth of the Museum, a series of essays in which Bennett applies to the development of the museum Michel Foucault’s ideas on the exercise of power through control and correction in clinic, asylum and prison. For Bennett, the museum apparatus – or “exhibitionary complex” – is another, more nuanced but comparable instrument of power relations.
Cullen surveys an exhibitionary complex in Ireland instituted by the British colonial administration and predictably subordinate to its aims and ideology. For example, Charles Bell Birch’s heroic memorial bronze depicting Walter Richard Pollock Hamilton, the Irish recipient of a Victoria Cross, in the throes of his final battle in Afghanistan, was prominently displayed in the Dublin Museum for a least a decade from 1890. Equally, Thomas Jones Barker’s paintings extolling England’s greatness and Robert Ker Porter’s spectacular propagandist panoramas were shown to local audiences who were more appreciative than one might expect.
As Cullen notes, it is worthwhile to ask what “people actually saw in 19th-century Ireland as opposed to what cultural historians wanted them to have seen”. Drawing on a wide range of material, he teases out some illuminating stories, as when Dublin-born Robert George Kelly’s elaborate painting of an eviction incident, exhibited at the British Institution in London in 1853, was, according to Walter Strickland, “actually discussed in the House of Commons”. This discussion is not in Hansard, Cullen comments, but the Illustrated London News criticised the painting for its vulgarity and artistic inferiority.
Kelly’s career is viewed in the context of eviction and emigration themes in mid- to late-19th-century Irish art, including a showing of lantern slides of eviction scenes, an event boldly organised by Maud Gonne in Dublin during Queen Victoria’s jubilee celebrations in June 1897.
After tracing distinctive representations of Ireland in a United States increasingly regarded as home by aspirational middle-class Irish immigrants, Cullen concludes his detailed, subtle and illuminating study with the opening of Hugh Lane’s Municipal Gallery of Modern Art in Dublin in 1908.
Aidan Dunne
