Book review: the visceral pulling power of music

A series of common riffs emerge that skilfully bond the assortment of essays on music in 'You spin me round'

Three of the contributors to ‘You spin me round’ are, from left,  Colin Graham, Peter Geoghegan, and Aingeala Flannery.

• You spin me round: Essays on music
• Edited by Adrian Duncan, Niamh Dunphy, Nathan O’Donnell 
• PVA Books: €15,00 

Popular culture has long been an easy entry point for writers trading in complicated narratives and deep thinking.

And so it is with You Spin Me Round, a largely Irish take on a well-worn universal theme: the visceral pulling power of music.

Beneath its delicate veneer, though, this smartly-assembled collection punches furiously. 

Within its dozen personal testimonies, all of them rooted in a wide range of direct experiences with music, a series of common riffs emerge that skilfully bond the assortment.

The wanton traditional musicians and set dancers at play in Miltown Malbay in Ciaran Carson’s ‘Marking Time’, for instance, have much in common with the New York clubbers in ‘Good Life’, McKenzie Wark’s love letter to the excellent electronica cut by Inner City.

Carson’s beautifully observed experience in a shebeen in west Clare, ‘Marking Time’, first published in 1996, is at the structural heart of this compendium. 

Like many of the creative drivers here, O’Looney’s — a curious ‘house open to the public’ in which his essay is set — extends far beyond the obvious. 

More than simply an illicit drinking den frequented by musicians and music lovers, it has much in common with The Underground, a fondly remembered dive bar on Dublin’s Dame Street. 

Run by the late Noel Brennan and his son Jeff, it’s where Aingeala Flannery in the opening contribution encounters the zesty Dublin band, A House, during the mid-1980s.

‘Some guitar-player, oblivious to protocol,’ Carson writes of O’Looney’s, ‘will start up a three-chord accompaniment in the wrong key in the middle of someone’s unaccompanied song.’ 

It’s a scene that will be familiar to those who regularly frequented The Underground.

Elsewhere, Brian Dillon’s paean to Iggy Pop is an unashamed fanzine-skewed piece on one of the more brutalist, pop art practitioners in that genre.

Dublin band A House feature in Aingeala Flannery’s opening contribution in ‘You Spin Me Round’. Picture: Getty

In recalling several live shows he performed as a singer with The Stooges and then later as a solo artist, ‘Pity the Meat: Notes on Iggy Pop’ foregrounds the singer’s career-long use of his whippet-thin body as a prop. 

In pushing himself to often absurd physical extremes on the live stage, is he that different to the jobbing trumpet player in Colin Graham’s excellent essay about the Russian composer, Dmitri Shostakovich? The latter, during a live performance of the politically-loaded  Symphony Number 7, ‘collapsed on stage because of the effort involved in playing it’.

Special mention also to Wendy Erskine’s excellent ‘Hot Legs’, which closes You spin Me Round with a flourish. 

As devilishly witty as it is unsettling, it opens as a cheeky critique of the promo clip for Rod Stewart’s 1977 single, ‘Hot Legs’.

Erskine uses that video — a compound of cliché and stereotype — to launch an intelligent take on the casual and often criminal sexism that has dogged rock music, and indeed society, for an eternity.

By the time the writer fetches up in Paris on an exchange visit as a teenager in 1983 she had, she writes, already ‘had a Santa Claus in a shopping centre ask me when I sat on his knee if he could have a nice kiss. A proper kiss’.

As with several of the fine essays collected here, the first cut isn’t always the deepest.