Hear ye! For our money, John Patrick Higgins isn’t just one of the sharpest, most wickedly funny writers on the island—he also has impeccable taste in music. Unfortunately, he is not paying us to say this.
Here, the Belfast-based author (and more besides) waxes lyrical on how artists like Wire, Cornelius, Ottawan, and Beth Gibbons have made his recent volte-face to gym life that bit more endurable.
John Patrick Higgins’ acclaimed debut book, Teeth, is out now via Sagging Meniscus Press. His debut novel, Fine, is out on 4th November
When I’m in the gym, staring vacantly at footage of a winding mountain passage as I huff and puff on the static bike (wiping a perfect peach of arse sweat from the seat afterwards. It’s gym etiquette.) or transfixed by the number of calories I’ve burnt according to the treadmill’s display screen, (after ten minutes of intrepid tramping, I’d scorched off a third of the Snickers ice cream bar I’d eaten in the car on the way over) I don’t listen to the music they play.
I pack my iPod nano shuffle and listen to the music I need to get me over that physical phitness mountain, screaming “Go Speed Racer!”, as I free-wheel down the other side into oncoming traffic.
This is what I listen to. Join me.
Cornelius – The Micro Disneycal World Tour
This one’s all over the place, like the wayward, naked granddads who wander around the changing rooms of the gym. Is this what happens when you get properly old? Joyfully strutting about in the nip, turkey giblets a-quiver, the powdery whiteness of their pubic hair like snow on a bird’s nest, lending their genitals a cosy, Christmassy feel. I envy them their freedom and innocence. The locker room is a prelapsarian paradise and they’re ancient Adams, their forbidden fruit dangling.
Cornelius’ song starts with the word “start” and ends with the word “groovy”, and glides between the ornate fuzziness of Stereolab, a lurching, mutant Beach Boys and sumptuous, woozy exotica. It’s a total trip. If you would rather be anywhere else than where you are now, this is a glorious soundtrack to no longer being there.
Let not a moonborn elf mislead you, from Henry Purcell’s proto-opera, King Arthur.
Stephen Varcoe’s baritone trilling, “hurry hurry hurry, hurry hurry hurry on” is the firm, but gently motivating voice I need to egg me on to my personal best. I don’t need a man with biceps like a clenched fist and a mobile DJ’s voice, insisting I feel the burn. I felt the burn as soon as I stepped on the treadmill, mate, and right now I’m Joan of Arc in smouldering Adidas Gazelles. What I need now is the chill mist of Purcell’s cool, dark chamber music.
Andy Fairweather-Low – Wide Eyed and Legless
I like drinking. It’s just great, isn’t it? Wet drugs that taste nice. Magic. According to the Bible, Noah invented wine, cultivating a vine Adam had stolen from the Garden of Eden. Adam, by my calculation, was Noah’s great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great grandfather, so that twig was at least 7625 years old. Check out the green fingers on Noah. That’s some sweet cultivating. Anyway, I don’t turn up drunk to the gym. Though there is a bar. You can get drunk at my gym.
Andy’s woozy paean to boozing, with its BBC light entertainment orchestration and high, slurred vocal, is a perfect accompaniment to my abdominal crunches, as I whittle away my beer belly with a vigour and commitment that is half self-preservation and half self-harm.
Wire – Outdoor Miner
It’s short. Very helpful when I’m doing the things I hate in the gym. Like exercising.
Why am I doing it? My new novel, Fine, is out in November and, for the resulting press roll-out, I want to look spritely and vital as I spill the tea on Pamela Ballentine’s sofa. Figuratively speaking. And literally speaking.
Les Baxter – Fruit of Dreams
A submarine choir. Rolling timpani and lilting flutes, a harp spangles lazily, and I’m lost at sea, staring at a South Seas princess in a conch shell hat as she rises from the azure waters. That’s where I am, listening to the sensual and iridescent exotica of Les Baxter, instead of sweating on a rowing machine in a room that smells like molten arse-crack, and watching a man in a capped sleeve t-shirt and New Balance trainers pacing angrily up and down, shouting into his phone about John Deere replacement parts.
Hardly anyone in the gym is working out. Unless they’re working out Sudokus, as they cock-block the static bikes and stare at their phones. Who is this rich? They’ve bought membership here, and they’re just wasting it, sitting around, doing nothing. These are the same people who talk all the way through gigs. Arseholes.
The Electronic Circus – Direct Lines
And I’m speeding down the autobahn, guided by the luminous tramlines of the city night. Everything is, reassuringly, European. I am probably smoking. The sleeves on my jacket are certainly rolled up. I look in the rear-view mirror at a sea of neon. There’s the waft of new car smell with top notes of Kouros eau du toilette. The air conditioning turns my breath to a wordless speech bubble.
I open my eyes. I’m on a recumbent bike overlooking the swimming pool. I can see my puce, glistening face reflected in the window. And I close my eyes. Back to Europe, after the rain.
Beth Gibbons – Whispering Love
I’m not just an old man listening to old music. Far from it. I love contemporary music too. Here’s a case in point: ‘Whispering Love,’ from Beth Gibbons’ brand spanking new album, Lives Outgrown. I mean, yes, Beth is even older than I am and, yes, she’s been recording since 1994. It was such a long time ago, she and Geoff Barrow formed Portishead after meeting on an Enterprise Allowance Scheme. Imagine. I never met anyone on an Enterprise Allowance scheme I wanted to start a fruitful musical relationship with. Or a conversation, for that matter.
The song is gorgeous. Wistful folk-horror flute and a timeless acoustic guitar figure, as Beth keens after ghosts, and pathetic fallacy shifts furniture in the background. One bit sounds like a wheelbarrow with a squeaky wheel. Eventually everything dips out and there’s just Beth’s yearning desperation for her vanished lover and then… someone pushes the volume up and the whole song encroaches on you. Fingers tap at windows. You make sure are your limbs are safely under the duvet. This is spooked, possessive stuff. Beth’s lover has died but she still won’t let them be. She haunts the ghost. I listen to this song on repeat, and the melody is new every time. It never settles, it never sinks in. It won’t be held.
Wesley Gonzalez – Protein & Perfume
I don’t subscribe to a work-out diet, or any sort of diet, though I was advised by the man who did my gym induction that a banana was a source of “quick, useful sugar”, so I bear that in mind. I listen to this power-riffing chugger, with its dour, witty lyrics, while on the abdominiser, crunching my way towards washboard flatness while enjoying the synthesised marimba solo.
Everyone in the gym appears to be proteined to the max. Probably yellow powder from a jar. The perfume of the gym is unspeakable, however.
Babybird – Bad Old Man
I AM a bad old man, at least that’s what my doctor tells me. My longstanding interest in salted snack treats and beer, means I can no longer paddle in the sea, as I’m frequently mistaken for the setting sun. For my size and shape, not any native hotness. Twisting along on an orchestral sample I haven’t been bothered to identify, Babybird lists the old man’s litany of crimes, and speaks to the guilt-stricken mummy’s boy in me. Spit invective at me, Stephen, I’ve been a bad, bad boy. I deserve this succession of agonising pectoral crunches. Look at me – I’m cruciform. My nipples are no longer on speaking terms.
Ultra Vivid Scene – The Portion of Delight
This one will help you get over the hill. From Ultra Vivid Scene’s oddball, Led Zep indebted third album, Rev, this is paced at a slow yomp, the tangle of guitar lines a Gordian knot, while the splashy drums lumber on and on. Kurt Ralske, the sole member of Ultra Vivid Scene, now a feted fine artist, says he regrets his decade and a half in the music industry, but I say, Kurt, if your music can help just one portly middle-aged gentleman stay on the treadmill that bit longer, as you labour through a series of multi-stranded guitar solos, then surely, it’s all been worth it. You’ve got to give something back.
Kurt probably sees things differently.
Ottowan – Hands Up
This is for the after-party. Following the mild nausea and headache that accompanies each visit to the gym, there is – I’m sorry to report – a high, where you start to feel really great. I know. I thought it was so much bullshit too, but no, it’s real. And when I feel good, I want to listen to Hands Up by Ottowan, a song where the late key change seems not only justified but necessary. Thomas Bangalter’s dad was in Ottowan, which means two things. 1) I’m so hip I’m listening to the dad of a band that split up three years ago and 2) Daft Punk are nepo babies. I knew it. Fucking rich kids. Don’t get me started on Air and Phoenix.
I’ve been doing this a couple of months. Am I toned and taut, clenched and hench? I am not. Am I red-faced, moist and permanently sore? God yes. Do I smell like rising damp? Yes, it’s true. Has it all been a colossal waste of time and money, money I could have spent on salted snack treats and beer? Not at all. I get to spend forty-five minutes, four times a week listening to the greatest music ever recorded – and also the songs listed above. I’m winning at life.
