Michael Bracewell, novelist and critic, gives an elliptical, wildly atmospheric remembrance, a poetic evocation, and a vivid eulogy for London of the late 1970s and early 1980s – the last years prior to the rise of the digital city, neglected in between times between 1979 and 1986, with the music of a golden era. His vivid details of haunted bedsits, post-punk entrepreneurs in the Soho Brasserie, occultists in Fitzrovia, Docklands before Canary Wharf, frozen suburbs in the winter of 1980. He highlights twilight of one era and the dawn of the another with an haunted reminiscence of an unseen “eye” ghosting around the metropolis watching, listening, recording, connecting.
Bracewell’s “ecstatic melancholy” of the time, locates a kinship between Paolozzi’s beautiful wall mosaics in Tottenham Court Road tube station and Soft Cell’s update of “What” Distinctions between high and low are collapsed in a way that feels ingenious.
Bracelwell’s journey takes him from Soho to Clerkenwell, from Marylebone to Docklands, as if music is one coordinate on his map, poetry is another. Louise Mitchell’s quote “Time was away and somewhere else” is an ideal epigrah this book. His wandering through Holborn and the visit to the old fashioned tailor’s in Sicilian Avenue, whose Edwardian splendour highlights the passing of the whole era, “like a ribbon of cologne or cigar smoke on the softening breeze”.
His poetry is quit vivid like “ So many Saturday nights, so many bright mornings of sharp frost and wet weekday evening traffic, wedding and gales in autumn, breast cancer, Sunday papers, scaffolding heights, London updated 1983”.
Bracewell notices the colour and cut of clothes, of architecture, of sounds and smells, of weather, of landscape, of faces and bodies and haircuts. He writes about Vignette of the early 1970s in the spectacle of T-rex playing Wembley, the music ”tight, heavy, urgent and deft” and Marc Bolan, spangled demigod of glam, executing” a perfectly timed jump with both feet off the stage, landing on the down chord”
Bracewell’s knowledge of a lifetime” is showcased and whittled down to 45, 000 words, took him 17 years to finish.
Souvenir by Michael Bracewell, White Rabbit, £14.99, 124 pages.