Tonight, I'm a rock and roll star! (Espedair Street - Iain Banks)

Member Name: hugon

Product:	Espedair Street - Iain Banks
Date:	20/08/01 (172 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Brilliant characters, Story well related, Quick pace

Disadvantages: Little short, May not appeal so much to non-music fans

“Two days ago I decided to kill myself. Last night I changed my mind and decided to stay alive. Everything that follows is just to try and explain”

They say never judge a book by its cover, but that’s exactly what I did with this one. Regular readers will know that a) I’ve started to become quite a fan of Iain Banks’ work and b) I like to get my books from the second hand bookshop because I’m tight. Well, looking round my wee bookshop, I happened to come across this one, I hadn’t seen it before and it had a guitar on the cover, which immediately grabbed my attention. Looking on the back and seeing that paragraph on the back really drew me in; I just had to buy it, even though it was a rather expensive £3 (expensive for my wee shop anyway, and like I said I’m tight).

Espedair Street tells the story of Daniel Weir, bass player and song writer for legendary 70’s rock band Frozen Gold, from his chance meeting with the band when they where just a pub band playing cover songs, and letting them see his material, joining the band as the bass player and their rise to one of the most popular bands of the seventies, and the events that lead to the break-up of the group, right through to why he now lives alone in an abandoned monastery, with only two friends and large crates of Russian alcohol.

That’s the plot. It isn’t action filled, or laugh a minute; it’s just a good old-fashioned story. It’s like being let into the innermost secrets of the band, it’s almost like reading Daniel Weir’s autobiography, or what it would have been if he had lived. It isn’t that you’re wanting to read what happened next that keeps you reading, more that you want to find out more about his character and the way he thinks.

It carries on the Iain Bank’s tradition of telling the story in the first person, and switching between events in the present and the pa
st. It starts by telling both the distant past and the past that happened a few days ago, and then gradually catching up to what is happening right now. Right back from when he was a teenager, on the outside of everything because of his lanky and clumsy outward appearance, and how he struggled to fit in from there on. It’s an excellent way of telling the story, as the distant past allows us to see why he feels this way, and the events of the recent past allow us to see what has triggered his wanting to kill himself.

The books appeal comes from the warmth of the story telling –it’s chatty and friendly, like he’s relating the events to an old friend he’s just recently got back in contact with. This makes it easy to pick up and get into; there isn’t an awkward few pages as you struggle to figure out who the characters are, as he introduces you to them gradually. Doing this makes us feel close to him, and you establish a real bond with him and begin to care about him. He tells the story with a real passion, describing the events vividly with the sights and colours and feelings he was experiencing, and even though it’s a book you can imagine it in your mind and experience the same feeling of elation or despair he was feeling. The tales are so real and engrossing that I soon forgot this was the tale of a man on the brink of suicide, and that brought me back down with a jolt when the past caught up with the present in the book.

The movement between past and present can be slightly disorientating at times, it takes a few sentences to realise where about in his past you are at times. I particularly enjoyed the way at times the past events he was relating didn’t seem to relate to events in the present, but as the story builds and you learn more, you can see how it all works with each other, how it has formed the man today. It’s a nice drip feed of information, it doesn’t just present it all to you
on a plate, you have to keep going, learning more as you go along.

The other part of the book I liked was Daniel trying to come to terms with the change in his lifestyle, and understanding other’s ways of life. Daniel was raised working class, and the rest of the band where middle class and he had to get used to their way of life and thinking, and then adjust himself when the money started to roll in. You can see he tries to get used to it, but never really gets the hang of it and holds on to a lot of his working class ideals to the end, even though he can see that they are only ideals and the world doesn’t really work that way – his talks with his friends, who are working class show that.

The one thing I would say is that Bank’s has a tendency to write the Scottish accent the way it is spoken, and for a non native like myself, it can sometimes take a few reads of the line to get what they’re talking about, I got a few strange looks as I mouthed the words to myself to try and understand it. It only happens in very few pages, and while it might be difficult to follow for some, it adds to the authenticity of the work.

The other criticism would be that it is quite short – under 250 pages. While this keeps the story flowing and ensures it isn’t filled with perhaps too much information to weight the story down and make it boring, I would have liked a bit more insight into life in the band and their history, as in a few places I feel that its perhaps a little glossed over. It’s probably just the wannabe rock star inside me wanting to know what that kind of life is like.

I don’t know what research or experience Banks has into the life of a rock star, but in my limited experience, and from other biographies of musicians I have read, it certainly sounds accurate, how the initial buzz from being in a band and making music you love can change to feelings of cynicism about the business, b
ecoming annoyed by the persistence of their own fans, becoming over critical of their own music, and how performing can become monotonous. Then there’s the other side of the life, the excess, booze and drugs, fast cars and big houses and the things they do to try and occupy themselves.

I couldn’t quite put my finger on why this book appealed to me so much. Probably because I’m so into music, I can’t guarantee that those not interested in music will find it as interesting. I just found it enthralling from start to finish, someone living the life I would like to live myself. I think I saw bits of myself in Daniel, his cynicism is the type I can show sometimes, and his outlook on the world is similar. If you enjoy music, it’s a definite must read, I would recommend it to everyone else as well, I don’t think anyone will hate it, but they might not enjoy it quite as much as I did. Definite five stars anyway, but pretend there are six there or something.

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