Only a week to go before the new Leonard Cohen album, ‘Old Ideas’, but in the meantime, here’s a track from an album that I didn’t hear last year (or it would have been high on my list below) but got for my birthday this week. I’ve been a fan of Meshell Ndegeocello since buying her classic break-up album Bitter in Portland, Maine on a road trip round the US in 1999. Her work moves between rock, jazz and soul and is consistently absorbing. She writes everything she performs, so I was surprised to find Leonard Cohen’s Chelsea Hotel on the new record. I’m not much of a fan of Cohen cover versions. A few are OK.  Jennifer Warnes Famous Blue Raincoat is pretty good. I do like kd lang’s version of Hallelujah (nowhere near as much as Cohen’s live versions). But, you know what? This slowed down, souled out version is terrific. As, on two plays, is the album. When this song was originally released on New Skin For The Old Ceremony (the tour for which was when I first saw, and met him) it was called Chelsea Hotel no. 2. That’s because there was an earlier, never released version with different lyrics. The version of it below was recorded in Israel, just after it was written in 1972. The song is, of course, about Janis Joplin, as he used to make clear in the introduction when performing it live. He was well advised to drop that ‘queer’ line. Words change their meaning.

Meshell Ndegeocello – Chelsea Hotel

Leonard Cohen – Chelsea Hotel No. 1

Have to confess that I still haven’t got round to watching The Killing. Managed the first few minutes of both the Danish and US versions, but neither looked worth a 20 episode commitment. I expect I’ll get round to the Danish version in time, but don’t hold your breath. There’s a glut of good TV at the moment and long may it last. This is a time when a four star funny series like Bored To Death gets cancelled after its second series and the best drama on television (for my money, were I allowed to pay for it) Breaking Bad doesn’t have a UK taker for its fantastic third series, or, at the time of writing, a scheduled dvd release. Mad. Meantime, backed up on my Sky+ box are about eight episodes of the very good but not wonderful Boardwalk Empire, a promising The Mystery of Edwin Drood, loads of the mad but very enjoyable American Horror Show, the first episode of the dependable The Good Wife and the last few episodes of the no longer so dependable Californication. That’s just the TV drama. The bulk of the 75% of my 160GB hard drive is taken up with documentaries (mainly music) and movies.

It takes something particularly good to get me to watch two episodes of a new drama the week it begins, but Borgen, a Danish political thriller, fits the bill. It’s absorbing, intelligent, superbly acted and, most of all, grown up. It helps, I suppose, that I don’t know enough about Danish politics to know how closely the different parties forming a coaliton correlate with reality, but it doesn’t feel like satire, or the bland, all politicians are the same slick selfish careerists that we get in US movies like the Ides of March. Nor is it the fairy tale, idealistic world of The West Wing. The politicos feel real, with flaws, sex lives and a sense of humour.

On Wednesday, Radio Four’s World At One had a long discussion of Borgen and why UK writers don’t touch politics in their books. The implication was that we shy away from it. Well, maybe. If so, there’s a reason.

The first big piece of writing I completed was a radio play called The Selection about a Labour councillor trying to get selected as a parliamentary candidate in the run up to the 1983 General Election. I didn’t get anywhere with it. A leading radio playwright read it for me and told me it was very good, but I ought to choose less contentious material. ‘Don’t give them an excuse to turn you down’. When I sold my first novel The Foggiest, therefore,  I left out of the synopsis that one of the characters was the Prime Minister and several scenes took place in the Houses of Parliament. More recently, every single Crime publisher in the UK (that’s right, all of them) turned down my crime and politics series Bone and Cane, primarily because they figured readers were put off by the politics. They themselves liked it, you understand, but readers think it’s boring. Bullshit. Politics is about power, corruption, ambition, moral dilemmas and changing the world: the really big stuff that’s at the heart of all great drama. The only problem with politics is that it’s very hard to compress into a novel (or TV drama, even more so a two hour movie) because it’s complicated, with elaborate rules, lots of history and a vast cast of characters. Writing about it realistically takes a lot of research and skill.

Thankfully, I got a great publisher for Bone and Cane, Tindal Street Press, who understood what I was trying to do and twice took the book to the top of the paid for on Kindle chart. Last week it was published as a mass market paperback. The second in the series, What You Don’t Know, is out in May, and can currently be bought for a fiver as a Kindle exclusive on Amazon, where it’s already garnered seven intelligent, very flattering five star reviews, despite having substantially more political content than the first novel. Of course, a few readers are put off by the political content, just as some who liked The Killing  won’t check out Borgen because of the setting. All I can say is, it’s their loss. You can still catch the first two episodes of Borgen on iPlayer. It continues with another double bill tonight.

Sorry, not been posting here regularly of late but university lectures to write, novel to copy-edit, then proof. I’ve been feeling guilty, so here’s today’s Saturday post (a day early as I’m at an NTU day school tomorrow, then a Five Leaves party). Another song from the forthcoming Lana Del Ray album has leaked, and you can download it below. Will Lana feature in this year’s best of year CD, which I’ve just done the prototype version of? You’ll be able to find out in a week’s time when, once again, I will post a track from our best of year cd every day until new year’s eve, with brief sleeve notes. Come back then, but in the meantime, enjoy this, the title track of Lana’s album, released on January 23rd next year.

Born To Die – Lana Del Ray

Two years ago, The Arctic Monkeys hit Nottingham on their first arena tour and most fans felt they didn’t pull it off. The well-worked sardonic wit that worked so brilliantly in a smaller space became a hard rock dominated set which only satisfied hard core fans at the front.

Two years on, the Ice Stadium has sold out again. The Arctics have become used to playing big gigs in the last two years, and their fourth album, ‘Suck It And See’, is their best since the first, full of glorious, pithy pop songs. This summer, in the weekend of its release, they played two huge Sheffield shows that were staggeringly good. Can they keep it up?

The Vaccines come on to ‘Rock’n’Roll Radio’ and wear their Phil Spector/Ramones influence on their sleeve. No bad thing. Their short, snappy, melodic songs make for an ideal warm up. ‘Do You Wanna?’ and closer ‘Norgaard’ stand out.

The Arctics take the stage to Hot Chocolate’s ‘You Sexy Thing’. They kick off with four singles, back to back, a real statement of intent. Alex Turner, with  his new quiff, constantly engages the audience as he failed to two years ago. Even if all he says amounts to ‘are you having a good time, Nottingham’, it’s the thought that counts. ‘I’ll Bet That She Looks Good On The Dancefloor’ gets played early on, creating an audience frenzy that – forty minutes in – carries the band into the ‘rock’ section of the show. By ‘Still Take You Home’ there’s a frantic mosh pit at the centre of the front standing.

The traditional mid-gig lull follows, where the band plays songs that they like, even if the audience reaction steadily flattens. New song ‘Evil Twin’ is OK, but sounds like the B side it is. The drummer gets to sing on plodding rocker ‘Brick By Brick’. ‘Love it or hate it’ Alex says of this one, but most are indifferent. ‘Black Treacle’ starts to lift things, then it’s a superb triple whammy to end the 70 minute main set. ‘Fluorescent Adolescent’, ‘Do Me A Favour’ and ‘When The Sun Goes Down’ all get an ecstatic reaction.

Opening encore ‘Mardy Bum’ – probably their most loved song – has a crowd singalong. A brilliant ‘Suck It And See’, then the lovely ’505′ sends everyone home happy. When your only complaints are that the band missed out a few favourites and 87 minutes seemed way too short, you know you’ve seen a terrific show.

The Arctic Monkeys – Suck It And See

Literature happens in the provinces. In a week when the metropolitan literati fall over themselves to boast that they’ve never heard of the Nobel Prize for Literature winner, the great Tomas Tranströmer, Sue and I recalled seeing him read in Huddersfield, twenty odd years ago (Did she read with him? The mists of time won’t part). And I found myself on a panel at a new literary festival, entirely about independent presses, chaired by Simon Thirsk, founder of Bloodaxe Books, who publish Tranströmer in this country and will have all of his books reprinted by Tuesday.

This was the first States of Independence West, after two very successful SoI East days in Leicester over the last two years, and it was good to see so many familiar faces. Birmingham has a thriving literary scene, as evidenced by Friday’s episode of The Verb, which was all about Birmingham and included a good interview with David Lodge about consciousness and the novel (available on iPlayer until Friday 14th). I was representing my Birmingham publisher, Tindal St, who got my Bone and Cane novel to number one on Amazon across three weeks this summer, and Nottingham’s Five Leaves who publish Secret Gardens and The Pretender, both of which I’m inordinately proud of.

And what did I say? Principally that the system isn’t working – at least, not for indy publishers or authors who aren’t huge best-sellers. The level of discounts demanded by Waterstones (60%) and Amazon (50-60+%) mean that  books published in small or smallish runs are never going to turn the sort of profits that publishers need to pay themselves a living wage. If you’re lucky, after paying a 7.5% royalty and warehousing and distribution costs, a publisher might be left with – at most – 20% of the cover price of any book with which to pay all of their other costs. You can do this if you outsource your subbing to India and your printing to China, but small presses don’t have those economies of scale. The eBook might help. Except that most of the same fixed costs apply to eBooks – you save on printing and warehousing, but authors get a higher royalty and eBooks attract VAT, which eat up those savings. Plus, people aren’t willing to pay premium prices for many eBooks. Mine are currently three or four quid. An economically sustainable model – if you want books edited and promoted properly – would probably price them at twice that. We didn’t have time to go into this, but many authors are self publishing their previously published work on Kindle, where the original publishers haven’t hung onto the digital rights. The paper editions of these novels effectively become loss leaders for the Kindle editions. Good for the authors, but not so good for the publishers, who may be megabucks corporations or heavily subsidised by the Arts Council, but are more likely to be in a rather more uncertain zone in between. Tricky times.

I bought some books from East Midlands publishers, including the latest Candlestick Press Christmas poems collection, edited by Carol Ann Duffy and the Collected Poems of my friend, the late Michael Murphy, which is launched in Liverpool next week by Shoestring Press. Alan Baker of the excellent Leafe Press gave me a lift home. My publisher at Five Leaves, Ross Bradshaw, also gave me a copy of their first CD, in which the great actress Jill Balcon reads (beautifully) the poems of her late husband, former poet laureate C.Day Lewis. Sadly, Jill died before the disc, which contains some of Lewis’s most personal work, was released. So, as well as an apt song of the week (a Nick Lowe B side that Wilco cover on their new album), here’s a poignant poem of the week, to celebrate National Poetry Day and the small presses that keep so much poetry alive.

C.Day-Lewis – Children Leaving Home

Nick Lowe – I Love My Label