PUSHING THE BUTTON
19 August 2006

The taxi driver has the radio on – Greek music. I’m sitting in the front seat waiting for other members of my family to get here from the apartment. Does he have the radio station with Greek music on because he thinks that’s what we want to hear as tourists in his country? When he goes home does he listen to Celine Dion? Or maybe Bruce Springsteen is his favourite. He puts out his hand to change the station to what I guess will be one playing hits from the 1980s because he thinks as middle-aged Western Europeans that is what we would rather be listening to. I imagine in that slither of a second we have to imagine these things that it is going to be Gold by Spandau Ballet playing when he hits the preset button. It's not. It’s more Greek music, a girl singing a ballad with the bouzouki trilling in the background. Maybe she is the Greek Celine Dion. He listens for a few seconds and then hits another preset button. More Greek music. A male singer, more up-tempo, the sort you could imagine Greeks smashing plates to. Remember in that chapter I was going on about Red Indians burning their wigwams and tepees? Well, after I’d learnt about that, the next time I saw that Greek plate-smashing thing I guessed it must be an example of potlatch. I imagined the rival families at a Greek wedding competing with each other to see who could smash the most prized dinner service, handed down through the generations.

So this taxi driver does not give a shit what we would prefer to be listening to. He wants to listen to Greek music and he has discerning tastes, any old Greek music will not do. It might sound the same to us, as in ‘It’s all Greek to me’, but to him it all sounds different.

The children turn up and we are off. No more station-hopping during the ten-minute taxi ride from where we are staying down to the harbour in Kos where we are to get a ferry across to Bodrum in Turkey.

Back in the 1960s my mum used to like watching the Nana Mouskouri Show on the telly. I used to like watching it with her. If I was with my mates, we would be listening to Disraeli Gears by Cream, but with my mum it was Nana Mouskouri. Both seemed right. Both fitted.

On this ten-minute taxi ride these are my thoughts. In the summer of 1973, after working for a couple of months in the steel works, I went and bought a Young Person’s Euro Railcard for £26. This allowed unlimited train travel across non-Soviet Pact Europe. I ended up in Greece. It was while I was there that I decided to knock art school on the head and become a writer instead. I would set out to experience as much as I could in life so I would have lots of material to draw upon. I may be too old to start making pop music of any kind, but you’re never too old to write. My second favourite writer at the time, Henry Miller, was still writing and he was very old. In fact, it was his book about Rhodes that had made me want to go to Greece.

In Greece I was pleased to discover that the new Roxy Music or David Bowie albums were not being played everywhere. All every sodding art student was playing was Bowie or Roxy. Every bar, café or tavern that I found myself in as I wandered and hitched my way around Greece played only Greek music. That is except for one bar in the port of Piraeus that had You’re My Venus by Shocking Blue on the jukebox. Back then I thought this only natural. If I had been in Italy, I would have expected only Italian music. In Poland, Polish etc. That is the way things should be, the natural order. As far as I was concerned it was only Britons and people in the English-speaking world who would have been into the pop and rock that we consumed.

Thirty-three years later back in Greece and I am surprised that Greeks are still listening to Greek music. The globalisation of what the American corporations promote to us has not worked here. I find this heartening, but here lies the contradiction. If I follow the logic of what I am proposing with The17, then surely the Greeks should dump all this listening to Greek music business. Within my experience alone they have been listening to it for a minimum of 33 years. As a form it must have been completely explored by now. There is nothing new that it can do, nowhere left for it to go. But I want to pat the Greeks on the back for still listening to the same sodding music that all sounds the sodding same. What does this say about me? Whatever it is I don’t like it.

Me going on about Greeks and Greek music is an example of thinking about music too much. Why can’t I just enjoy it for what it is? The Greeks seem to. They have obviously hit on a music that expresses everything in life that needs to be expressed via music in a form that never runs dry for them.

Yesterday I wrote the chapter about the prison skiffle band and me at the age of 5, cutting in with me at 24 and the first Big In Japan gig. I thought it was a really clever bit of writing but nothing could really follow it up. The piece lost focus. This morning I wanted to write about the contradictions we can have in our thinking about music. I thought the taxi driver and his changing channels and Greek music would only take the opening paragraph of this chapter.

Between the ‘never runs dry’ line above and the ‘yesterday I wrote’ line we have taken the ferry from Kos in Greece to Bodrum in Turkey. The difference in these two civilisations has fascinated me since I first read the Trojan War stories as a kid. As a young man I used to read the Nikos Kazantzakis books, all set in a time when so many Greeks were under the thumb of the Ottoman Empire. I love the choral music of the Greek Orthodox Church but I would rather eat at a Turkish restaurant. Last night I went for a haircut in a Greek barber’s. On the TV was a Saturday night family variety show. It was all Greek music. Right now I am sat in a Turkish barber’s waiting to be given a shave. You may already know that I have a big thing about going to different barbers, which forms a whole strand of my practice. I won’t go into it here but if you want to know more, visit www.penkiln-burn.com/highlights/get_your_hair_cut/get_your.html

What I will say is having a shave in a Turkish barber’s is one of the best things you will ever experience. I am not one for decadence, a point I have laboured elsewhere on numerous occasions, but a shave in a Turkish barber’s is a decadence I can’t turn down. If you are a woman, I would stretch the recommendation to you as well, just for the sensation, even though you would have little for his cutthroat razor to shave.

Bodrum is a tourist hellhole. The family members are seeking shade and solace in an ice cream parlour. I clocked this rather rundown barber’s squashed between the shops selling tourist tat and fake designer gear. Balanced on top of the mirror is a tiny transistor. Blaring from it, at full volume, is distorted Turkish music. My relationship with Turkish music does not stretch back over the decades like Greek music but nevertheless over the past few months it has been quite intense.

Stoke Newington, in northeast London, has a big Turkish/Kurdish community. All the grocers’ shops and most other shops of any kind are run by Turkish Kurds. Stoke Newington is, as I mentioned earlier in the book, where I now find myself living. Everywhere you go there Turkish music is blaring out, unless they have got Turkish football matches on. The Turkish music differs from Greek music in many ways, the most obvious difference is that it is more Arabic in sound. What is similar is that they are both driven by a plucked string instrument, for the Greeks the aforementioned bouzouki, for the Turks the saz.

For a few weeks in Stoke Newington I was unable to get myself online so I used to go out and use a Turkish Internet café to do my emails. This Internet café also doubles as a music shop. They sell Turkish music. They have stacks to choose from. They also sell Turkish instruments and give music lessons in the basement. Young Turkish boys and girls would come in clutching cases containing their saz. There were a few times in there when I would pick up a saz from the display rack and have a go. I even had thoughts about signing up for the lessons but every time I picked one up I got looks of serious disapproval from the boss. I imagined I was being caught stepping over some cultural divide and that it was more than impolite to even think about doing so.

As for the CDs and cassettes on sale, I have on a number of occasions found myself flicking through the G rack, (remember, I’m only listening to Gs this year) and choosing one to purchase based on the cover. Every time I get one home I discover it is shit.  So, the question is, how come Turkish music sounds so brilliant coming out of a tiny radio, all distorted, but shit when coming out of my system at home? The answer may be obvious but I needed to pose it anyway. But the question I wanted to ask in this chapter, after I had done my opening paragraph in the taxi was, why do I love the record Push The Button by the Sugababes so much?