CRAIG BROWN
Berkmann’s Pop Miscellany Marcus Berkmann Little, Brown €20.25
Kylie Minogue is almost exactly a year older than Jacob Rees-Mogg. It’s probably fair to say that the world is divided into those who find this information vacuous and those who find it utterly fascinating. I count myself among the latter. In fact, I have been preoccupied by Kylie and Jacob’s age difference ever since I first read about it in Berkmann’s Pop Miscellany. With youth so firmly on his side, would it not be more appropriate for Jacob Rees-Mogg to appear at the O2 in something skimpy singing ‘I should be so lucky, lucky, lucky, lucky’? Or, to put it another way, wouldn’t it be more becoming for Kylie Minogue to deliver a suitably solemn speech on the benefits of a market economy to the next Conservative Party Conference?
Berkmann’s Pop Miscellany is a treasure trove of snippets about the world of pop. This is not to say that anyone other than Berkmann could find every single snippet worth reading. For instance, I was not remotely interested to discover, on another page, that Kylie’s sister Dannii was born on exactly the same day – October 20, 1971 – as Snoop Dogg. This is because both Dannii and Snoop leave me yawning, and the combination of the two strikes me as insufficiently unexpected.
‘In Berkmann’s jaunty phrase, crooner Bing Crosby “beat his children like gongs”’
It’s all down to personal taste. I was fascinated to hear that, after his grandmother died, Eric Clapton took possession of her parrot, Maurice, who, it turned out, had only ever learned to say one thing: ‘Where’s Eric?’ To me, it’s like a perfect little short story, packed with the comical and the unexpected. But at the same time I can see that it might leave others baffled.
The book focuses more on pop stars than pop music, which is just as well, since Berkmann’s taste in music is singularly perverse. Just like Alan Partridge, he prefers ‘quite a lot of Wings albums to almost every Beatles album’. He devotes a mammoth two-and-a-half pages to praising the dreary Kraftwerk, but finds Bob Dylan’s voice ‘unbearable’, saying it makes him ‘want to scream and shout and break things’. He is certainly no slave to fashion.
He is rude in passing about two songs for which I have a soft spot. He says he has ‘always hated’ Simon and Garfunkel’s nearperfect Bridge Over Troubled Water and he describes Peter Sarstedt’s evocative Where Do You Go To (My Lovely)? as simply ‘fatuous’. He dislikes the Velvet Underground, while praising the ‘pop brilliance’ of boring old ELO. He also confesses to having ‘always loved’ the blood-curdling screeches of the Bee Gees.
But each to his own, and, happily, Berkmann’s personal jukebox plays second fiddle to good stories, or what he describes