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May 17, 2022
Benjamin Myers' Playlist for His Novel "The Perfect Golden Circle"
In the Book Notes series, authors create and discuss a music playlist that relates in some way to their recently published book.
Previous contributors include Jesmyn Ward, Lauren Groff, Bret Easton Ellis, Celeste Ng, T.C. Boyle, Dana Spiotta, Amy Bloom, Aimee Bender, Roxane Gay, and many others.
Benjamin Myers' The Perfect Golden Circleis a quiet and powerful novel of friendship and art, set unforgettably in the English countryside.
Kirkus wrote of the book:
"A quiet, peculiar, and utterly charming novel about...crop circles ... A winsome pleasure: a novel of friendship, collaboration, and environmental guerrilla art.""
In his own words, here is Benjamin Myers' Book Notes music playlist for his novel The Perfect Golden Circle:
The Perfect Golden Circle is a hymn for the English landscape. The novel takes place over the course of the summer of 1989, a crucial crossroads in British politics that saw Margaret Thatcher’s right-wing government introducing various laws that restricted people’s ability to gather in public, or travel in convoy. This at a time when unemployment was at high levels following the shutting down of various longstanding industries; a time when people just wanted to party. Which they did anyway: the rave / acid house party scene was born in what was dubbed “the second summer of love”, and all across England scores of illegal outdoor parties took place in remote locations.
It was also summer of crop circles. It is here in a series of similar ancient locations in the counties surrounding Stonehenge, that the two protagonists of The Perfect Golden Circle – Calvert, a taciturn army veteran traumatized by the Falklands War and Redbone, a van-dwelling punk following an historic tradition of landscape dissidents – secretly gather to make crop circles of mind-blowing proportions.
While I could have listed the various iterations of punk that were a part of the cultural climate, some of which I still enjoy today– anarcho, hardcore, crust – a lot of it is unlistenable in the best possible way, so instead this soundtrack offers a broader view of England’s deep and difficult past.
Vitamin String Quartet – Son Et Lumiere (The Mars Volta cover)
I’ve already contradicted myself by starting with a US band: The Mars Volta, who I liked a lot; they always challenged their listeners by being one step ahead of expectation. Like the best progressive music, they indulged themselves entirely and won the hearts and minds (admittedly of spaced-out twenty-something dudes, if no-one else.)
I must confess, I have no idea who Vitamin String Quartet are but given The Mars Volta made music that I couldn’t possibly contemplate writing too, their instrumental interpretations of TMV’s finer moments found their way onto the soundtrack for The Perfect Golden Circle. The combination of the pastoral sounding strings of the former and the odd time signatures of the latter created a crepuscular atmosphere that perfectly complimented my novel, which is entirely set between the hours of sunset and sunrise. In this space, the lines between boundaries both real and imagined become blurred and anything can happen. And does.
Billy Buckingham – The Waysailing Bowl
Wassailing (or waysailing) is a traditional winter custom where people offer thanks and gratitude for a favourable apple harvest in coming the year ahead (a theme that appears in the 1971 film The Wicker Man). As with most English folk customs, it centres drinking and singing, and this boisterous version – recorded, I suspect, in a West Country pub – encapsulates this collision of pure paganism and unadulterated hedonism. Billy Buckingham, whoever he may be, strays from the melody in such a way as to be utterly captivating. Blur also recorded a very good version. It was probably their finest hour, come to think of it.
Circulus – Summer Is Icumen In
Another traditional English song – it dates from around 1250AD and was one of the very earliest songs to be written down – is here given life by South London’s oddballs 00s folk-rock revivalists (look them up – they’re worth it). It is often sung in middle English, an alien tongue which morphed into the language that we in the UK and US speak today. Here are the opening lines as they were originally sung: “Sumer is icumen in / Lhude sing cuccu / Groweþ sed / And bloweþ med / and Springþ þe wde nu / Sing cuccu.”
In short, it is about the cuckoo signalling the arrival of spring. You’ll have to trust me on this.
Demonik – Labyrinthe
A key acid house track, ‘Labyrinthe’ was made by a seventeen year old Asian lad with a Morrissey haircut. As it turns out, he now lives down the road from me in the hillside town of Hebden Bridge, West Yorkshire, and we walk our dogs together.
It’s quite hard to emphasise the level of media outrage in the UK over the free party scene that took place in the final few summers of the 1980s. What the politicians, the police and the tabloid newspapers failed to recognize was that the notion of people getting together in the fields after dark was a centuries-old ritual that could never truly be curtailed. That the scene became tainted by dodgy drugs and dodgy crime gangs was perhaps an inevitable by-product of something that took place in a lawless space. At 13 years old in 1989 I was too young to appreciate the rave scene – I was probably listening to Faith No More – but the anger directed from the establishment over a pursuit that was harmless was enough to grab my attention and show me that institutional authority is, at best, misguided and at it’s very worst close to fascistic. Party on.
Vashti Bunyan – Rainbow River
One of the purest and most unadorned voices that English folk music has ever produced. Rarely has an artist been less interested in commercial success than in the anti-career of dear Vashti, who gave it all up to travel the highways of Britain in an old gypsy caravan, without so much as a waterproof or stout pair of Wellington boots. This reflects the same approach of Redbone and Calvert, who make art for art’s sake. The beauty of their endeavour is in its secrecy and complete lack of ego: they can never claim glory for their crop circles. Their anonymity is everything.
Crass - Do They Owe Us A Living?
Punk was my entry point into music, albeit in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Crass created ugly music for ugly times – what is known as a right din – but, again, their sense of mischief-making was merely part of a rich lineage of situationist shit-stirring, pranksterism and general agit-prop inventiveness. Also again, a lot of Class is unlistenable, but that was part of the point: they were an assault on cultural mediocrity and the listener’s senses. (Side note: someone should play Ed Sheeran some Crass, then we might all be spared his strangulated masturbatory simper.)
Richard Dawson – The Vile Stuff
I believe this to be the best song of the 2010s, even though – or perhaps because – it sounds as it if has been beamed in from another era, another dimension. It’s a sixteen-minute epic that charts a school trip that rapidly descends into a Dante-esque hellscape where nothing is quite as it seems. A first listen suggests it to be an impenetrable drone but I urge listeners to give themselves over to it. Discordant guitars chime, Richard wails and the whole thing collapses into a screaming pile of mayhem. It’s intense, it’s beautiful, it’s confusing. It’s visionary. Everything I strive for – but rarely, if ever, achieve - in my novels.
Can – Vitamin C
I’ve broken my own rules for a second time by including a German band. But I love Germany: it’s like Britain but things work and run on time. ‘Vitamin C’ is probably Can’s best-known track and it has got me through a lot of long nights, as I cower in my hovel, staring bleary-eyed at an evening news full of death, destruction and despots running amok, briefly breaking my gaze only to huff on a rancid old bong, cough, and then lean over and turn the volume up. Ah, the sweet mystery of life. For the drums alone, this song is essential.
Gong – I Never Glid Before
I’m fascinated by what came after the naïve peace-and-love bands of the 1960s: specifically, all those mad bastards like Hawkwind, Gong, The Pink Fairies, The Groundhogs and Henry Cow who in the 1970s seemed intent on either cranking things up or twisting rock music into odd new shapes that completely subverted the form. Their lifestyles seemed to reflect this sea change too, in that communal living, transience, faddish diets and outlandish clothes were as essential as the music itself.
Gong were like minstrels from another age, who best sum up this cultural shift. For all its downsides, Britain in the 1970s was a place where many free-thinkers infiltrated such places as mainstream television and ended up making TV shows – including kid’s dramas - that will still bend your head today. And for that I salute them, as I salute all people who attempt to make life that little bit more liberated, that little bit more colourful.
Benjamin Myers is a British former music journalist whose work appeared in leading publications including NME, Melody Maker, MOJO and Kerrang. He has since gone on to become one of the UK's leading novelists, with several award-winning books including The Gallows Pole, which won the Walter Scott Prize for historical fiction; The Offing, which was a Times (of London) and BBC Radio book of the year; and Pig Iron, which won the Gordon Burn Prize. He has also published poetry and short fiction, and has continued to write journalism for such publications as The Guardian, New Statesman, and New Scientist. He lives in England's Upper Calder Valley in West Yorkshire.
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