.
Now here’s a thought. The Morris Minor is 60 next year. And someone called Martin Wainwright has just published its ‘biography’. It’s a vehicle that’s still seen on our roads, in spite of having been developed and manufactured initially way back at the end of the 1940’s, when all cars had proper wheel arches, chrome bumpers, thin tyres, wing mirrors, if any, on the front wings, and chrome wheelcaps.
Those were the days - the 1950’s - when new council estates like ours had streets that were virtually car-free, and the few cars you saw parked on them tended to be ancient black Austins, Morrises, Standards, Hillmans, Fords and Vauxhalls, some of them with semaphore indicators, not flashing lights.
I happened to notice when I was out walking the dog yesterday that most of the vehicles in my relatively downmarket part of the city are now BMWs, Mercedes, Audis, VWs, Citroens and Renaults, with a scattering of Fords and Vauxhalls. Not many of them new or nearly-new, but all the same - quality vehicles that are comfortable, quick, safe and reliable.
The Morris Minor was none of those things, but what it did have, and still has, is character and charm. It had individuality and a certain funkiness. It’s a legend, like that other Issigonis classic, the Mini. See also the Beetle, the Fiat 500, and the Deux Chevaux. It’s ripe for an update, a revamp, a retro makeover.
Kathryn Hughes’ review of the new book about the Morris Minor mentions the possibility of a complete update and a new version, but also points out that the Nanjing Automobile Corporation of China has, since 2005, owned all the rights to the Morris marque.
It’s impossible to imagine that VW or Fiat (or GM, Ford and Chrysler for that matter) would ever let their brand die and be sold off to the highest bidder, but we do things differently here, and New Labour, like Thatch, has been no respecter of the traditions and skills of our Midlands motor manufacturers, designers, engineers, craftsmen and assemblers, and all that their industry did to help win the last war and bring prosperity to this country when the war ended.
One day I’ll get round to writing a long meditation on what I saw from the inside, as a trainee and a ‘commercial apprentice’ (and I still have my certificate of apprenticeship), within the Midlands motor industry. What a sorry tale of management incompetence and failure that was - with the unions of course getting all the blame for all the problems that caused the indigenous UK motor industry to flounder and sink.
What a sorry tale of management arrogance, incompetence and gross negligence. How could any decent management possibly have allowed the manufacture of rubbish like the Austin Allegro and the Morris Marina, which no sensible person wanted to buy?
A green Morris Minor van was the first commercial vehicle I ever drove, in my first ever job, working part time delivering unwrapped bread for what would now be called a ‘boutique bakery’ - a wonderful Victorian bakehouse set at the end of a row of terraced Victorian houses. I was seventeen and had just passed my driving test in a mark one Vauxhall Viva. Lovely car. Excellent gear change, as I recall. Even then it made the Morris seem outmoded and past its sell-by date.
I’d started the job when the bakery was still delivering bread from two 2-wheeled horse-drawn vans, and as a fifteen year old I had to learn from my cousin how to feed, groom, saddle up and insert the horses between the shafts of the vans. And then I had to learn how to drive them safely on city streets, where many drivers were startled to see such vehicles trundling around like some sort of throwback or apparition from a bygone age.
The two horses, which were stabled right next to the door of the bakehouse, had very different characters. By the time I started they were quite old, and after a couple of years the decision was made to replace them with two Morris Minor vans. Truly the end of an era.
So the Minor has always had a special significance for me, and I feel nostalgic about it, as do many people who take the trouble to keep thousands of them running in spite of their unfitness for purpose.
The wonderful Tony Hawks even had a band called Morris Minor and the Majors, which you can check out on youtube, performing the magnificent Stutter Rap:
http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=JAIOzM7SsMo
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morris_Minor_and_the_Majors
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This weekend I’ve read two other reviews that are worth noting:
1. Outliers: The Story of Success, by Malcolm Gladwell.
Clearly Gladwell has been a minor sensation on his recent visit to this country to promote his book and his ideas.
A couple of quotes from the review, by Derek Draper:
The crucial factor in achieving the extraordinary is to be in circumstances that allow sustained development of innate talent - "a kind of accidental 'hot-housing'" . . .
(NB all those responsible for education policy)
Gladwell does more than regurgitate. He first identifies and then takes hitherto obscure ideas, fills them out into a compelling narrative and adds plenty of anecdote and drama, before finding for them a mass and appreciative audience.
At the book's heart is the revelation that pure intelligence isn't enough. What great successes need is not the highest IQ but a high IQ, accompanied by other factors. What he's saying, in a message that should be seized on by anyone who regards themselves as progressive, is that it is society that provides the conditions for success, rather than the super-talented individual alone.
(The message should also be that other sorts of intelligence plus creativity and imagination are essential, and that IQ alone achieves nothing.)
Nuclear physicist Robert Oppenheimer . . . reached the pinnacle of achievement because his family taught him the social skills necessary to work his way through numerous obstacles.
(NB social intelligence)
Gladwell's previous two books, Tipping Point and Blink, sold nearly five million copies. They eloquently argued that social phenomena are spread in the same way as disease, and that our instinct can be more valid than our circumspection.
(This is a crucial point - that we need to understand and appreciate the importance of instinctual intelligence. Interestingly I had a conversation with my son this morning about how dogs, for example, live entirely in the present, and by instinct, or instinctual intelligence. They have no reference to either the past or the future, and cannot deal with anything through intellectual processes. Trainers of dogs understand that you cannot make a dog learn anything through either punishing them or rewarding them for something that happened even a short time previously - you have to act on what they’re currently doing in order to reinforce or diminish a certain ‘instinct’ or tendency, or else forget about it.)
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2008/dec/06/review-outliers-malcolm-gladwell
2. The Hugo Young Papers edited by Ion Trewin - reviewed by Chris Patten
A few quotations:
This is not the single focus of the self-centred diary of a bit-part shit or of a grander political beast on the post-retirement financial make; this is what a balanced and intelligent man found out about what was happening in Britain and beyond over a generation. For anyone interested in the politics of our times, this is a gold mine. Bring your drills, hammers and chisels, and start digging.
For any serious journalist, this volume must be an object lesson in how a clever practitioner should pursue the professional quest for information and insight.
As a peerless political commentator, an old-fashioned liberal intellectual with a rigorous attachment to values and principle, he managed to keep in play a range of contacts that spanned the political firmament, including many whose political careers had never been touched by his own instinctive liberalism.
In this volume, Blair is the missing prince, or perhaps gravedigger. He was clearly one of a small number of politicians who declined to allow the record of their conversations with Young to be published, even after some necessary revision. He stands at the heart of the tale that wends its extraordinary way through these pages - Britain's bizarre relationship with its principal chosen instrument in the pursuit of its national interest, the European Union.
[Blair was] a prime minister who frittered away the large majorities lavished on him by the electorate and who forsook the chance to augment Britain's influence in Europe, choosing instead to provide fawning and sanctimonious support for Washington's dirty work in the Middle East. So, as Young wrote from his deathbed, our country ceased to be sovereign, making the sort of sacrifice of independence never required in the EU, and was left by Blair "in abject thrall to Bush and his gang". The moral contempt scorches the page.
Talk about looking back in anger - these eleven wasted years; these years of disastrous, unproductive, neo-conservative, neo-thatcherite arrogance, stupidity and cowardice .
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2008/dec/06/hugo-young-chris-patten-blair-brown
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Looking Back In Anger
And talking about arrogance and stupidity, and looking back in anger, there was a long and very revealing article in the Weekend magazine yesterday about Noel Gallacher and Oasis. I’ve never understood their popularity, though by listening to Mr G talking to Russell Brand live on the radio I’ve come to appreciate that he’s a very bright and quick-witted individual with a really good sense of humour.
The music, however, and his appreciation of music, is another story. The magazine piece begins;
Noel Gallagher is listing the world's 10 greatest bands on his fingers, and working out where Oasis sit among this lot. "The Beatles, Stones, Who, Sex Pistols, Kinks, Jam, Smiths, Stone Roses, Bee Gees." He pauses. "I'm putting us at seven ahead of the Smiths cos we've done more." It's classic Gallagher, the great Mancunian motormouth.
It’s complete bollocks is what it is. Where do you even start with someone who thinks like that? Those aren’t even Britain’s greatest bands, let alone the world’s. What they are is just a selection of the best ever POP music bands. The Stones and The Who are the only ones with any blues or R & B roots. The Jam and the Stone Roses are just terrible anyway, though the Beatles had a touch of genius and the Bee Gees wrote and performed some brilliant eclectic songs that appeal to a very wide range of people and age groups.
The Sex Pistols and The Smiths are English eccentrics, brilliant in their own way, but not capable of long life due to the fact that they wrote so little that was of the very highest calibre, and also because of the personality defects of their key members.
The character defects of the Gallacher brothers are very well known, though Noel, at least, used to have some musical talent. But how can he seriously ignore the true greats of the musical firmament - people like Cohen and Dylan, Hendrix and Santana, let alone the great jazzers and bluesmen. This is pure ignorance and stupidity.
Live Forever [from ‘Definitely Maybe’] was Oasis' first top 10 hit - a unique mix of raucous rock and drunken optimism. But while their first album anticipated success, the second (What's The Story) Morning Glory? was about rock'n'roll fulfilment. There was a sense of wistfulness in the famous ballads, Wonderwall and Don't Look Back In Anger, as if Gallagher was already nostalgic for something that had barely started. These two songs became the supreme arm-in-arm, cigarette-lighter anthems of the 90s. They were also archetypal Oasis songs - loaded with emotional meaning, and yet virtually meaningless in themselves (what is a wonderwall, why is Sally waiting, who exactly is looking back in anger?).
He says he often didn't understand his lyrics, yet the larger meaning is transparent - the yearning for something better.
Well if HE didn’t ‘understand’ his damn lyrics then it’s no wonder nobody else could either. As for ‘yearning for something better’ - is that supposed to be insightful, profound or enlightening? ‘Cos it’s not.
Noel regrets that Oasis never did well in America. Well I have to tell him, one of the reasons for that was because Oasis were not very good. America has thousands of decent bands that play great music with real musicianship and some great vocalists. Liam looks, behaves and sounds like a twat. And according to Noel, Liam was supposed to be the focal point and the star attraction of the band. Duh! He was such a tosser he didn’t even manage to get on the plane for the band’s first tour of the USA. Though that could have been a clever move on his part, if he sensed that American audiences were going to react very badly to his drunken, yobbish uselessness.
What interests me is how he managed to keep going when he thought his best work was behind him. He says maybe he shouldn't have done. After Wonderwall and Don't Look Back In Anger became national anthems, he struggled.
"Between ‘Be Here Now’ and ‘Don't Believe The Truth‘, which spans five years, I was putting out records for the sake of it. We shouldn't have bothered, I didn't have anything to write about."
The trouble is nobody told him he was writing rubbish songs. Liam would tell him everything was great because he'd be desperate to get back in the studio and record something new.
"A lot of it I listen to and think only an egomaniac would convince himself that that was worth putting on. I say to my manager, 'You told me it was brilliant.' And he goes, 'Well, you don't tell the goose that laid the golden egg that his arse is blocked up, do you?' " If he'd been really brave, he says, he would have called it a day after Definitely Maybe.
"Morning Glory is for the squares... It's up there with all those great crossover albums like Thriller, and the greatest-selling albums of all time like Phil Collins and Genesis."
So if Morning Glory is just mediocre, meaningless mush that’s ‘for the squares’, which it is, then clearly Oasis should have quit right after their very first album. And yet he has the gall to say Oasis are the seventh greatest band in the world? What an idiot.
As for the Oasis/Blur rivalry, Mr G says,
"Looking back now that fight's all so pathetic over two really quite shit pop songs."
And that’s all that Oasis have ever been about - some really quite shit pop songs.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2008/dec/06/noel-gallagher-oasis
PS Noel couldn’t write decent lyrics, but what he could do was put together some music that had some interesting and satisfying chord changes and some good melodies. Credit where it’s due. Unfortunately that’s not enough to make him a good songwriter.
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